This book is an original study of “Cold Rush,” an accelerated race for the extraction and protection of Arctic natural resources. The Northernmost reach of the planet is caught up in the double developments of two unfinished forces – rapidly progressing climate change and global economic investment – working simultaneously in tension and synergy. Neither process is linear or complete, but both are contradictory and open-ended.

This book traces the multiplicity of Cold Rush in the Finnish Arctic, a high-stakes ecological, economic, and political hotspot. It is a heterogeneous space, understood as indigenous land within local indigenous Sámi people politics, the last frontier from a colonial perspective, and a periphery under the modernist nation-state regime. It is now transforming into an economic hub under global capitalism, intensifying climate change and unforeseen geo-political changes.

Based on six years of ethnography, the book shows how people struggle, strategize, and profit from this ongoing, complex, and multidirectional change.

The author offers a new theoretical approach called critical assemblage analysis, which provides an alternative way of exploring the dynamics between language and society by examining the interaction between material, discursive, and affective dimensions of Cold Rush. The approach builds on previous work at the intersection of critical discourse analysis, critical sociolinguistics, nexus analysis and ethnography, but expands toward works by philosophers Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari.

This book will be of interest to researchers on language, discourse, and sociolinguistics interested in engaging with social critique embedded in global capitalism and accelerating climate change; as well as researchers in the social and human sciences and natural sciences, who are increasingly aware of the fact that the theoretical and analytical move beyond the traditional dichotomies like language/society, nature/human and micro/macro is central to understanding today´s complex, intertwined social, political, economic and ecological processes.

If you enjoy the show, support us by subscribing to the Language on the Move Podcast on your podcast app of choice, leaving a 5-star review, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Reference

Pietikäinen, S. (2024). Cold Rush: Critical Assemblage Analysis of a Heating Arctic. Palgrave Macmillan.

Additional resources

Cold Rush project website
“Language and tourism” on Language on the Move

Transcript (coming soon)

(Image credit: Scott Graham on Unsplash)

Judges are masters of applying the law, but how well do they truly understand the language they use? During a judgment-writing course in my law degree at the Australian National University (ANU), I noticed that while judges make deliberate linguistic choices, their understanding of language—particularly in relation to achieving clarity—could benefit from linguistic expertise.

As a law and linguistics student, I’m often frustrated by the lack of explicit focus on language in legal education. When language is occasionally acknowledged, it is often treated as a neutral vessel for meaning—an assumption that linguistics studies teach you to question.

In 2024, I had the privilege of being a student in the inaugural Judicial Reasoning course at ANU. Designed and convened by Associate Professor Heather Roberts (who runs ANU Law’s Visiting Judges Program) and co-taught with Dr Anne MacDuff, the course brought nine current and former judges with diverse legal backgrounds into the classroom to discuss judgment writing. I gained rare insight into judges’ beliefs about language, and was pleasantly surprised by their heightened awareness of its role in judgment-writing, as well as their ability to make conscious linguistic choices to achieve their desired communication goals. However, their awareness of language seemed to be guided more by their intuition and legal training than linguistic expertise. This is not surprising as few judges are trained in linguistics, but it does raise important questions about the need for greater integration of linguistics in law. The following reflections are based on my own observations of the insights shared by the judges during this course.

Who do judges write for?

The judges were most explicitly aware of language when they talked about writing for a particular audience. They generally wrote for those most directly affected by the judgment. For some judges, this was an individual or community seeking justice for personal harm. For others, this was the legal community seeking answers to complex legal questions, particularly higher courts that may review their decisions.

From my observations, the choice between an audience of laypersons and one of legal practitioners correlates with important linguistic consequences. Judges writing for a legal audience often want their writing to increase distance between themselves and their audience (what I’ll refer to as +D), while the judges writing for laypersons tend to want their writing to minimise distance between themselves and their audience (what I’ll refer to as –D). To achieve these differing goals, judges employed somewhat contrasting linguistic techniques.

How do judges achieve +D in writing for legal audiences?

Judges seeking to achieve +D were often writing for higher courts and emphasised the importance of objectivity, accuracy and impartiality in their legal reasoning to reduce the likelihood of further appeal. The judges cited avoiding emotionally-laden language as important to maintain impartiality. As one judge explained, ‘you are talking to a transcript’.

Clarity in writing was viewed as the most important goal in achieving +D. The judges encouraged efficiency and brevity in achieving clarity, with one judge suggesting to ‘take out all the words you don’t need’, including summarising the statement of the facts in appeal cases. This approach to clarity favours the ‘legal register’ with formal language, legal terminology, and passive voice. Technical legal terms, phrases and syntax most efficiently communicate specific legal meanings to the legal experts who are familiar with them.

How do judges achieve –D in writing for lay audiences?

On the other hand, judges seeking to achieve –D tended to emphasise a desire for their writing to express empathy and compassion. Judges with this goal were often dealing with criminal or negligence matters, and described themselves as ‘writing for the loser’. One such judge demonstrated a keen awareness of linguistic tools: acknowledging and engaging with the intended audience by directly addressing them, framing their experience in their own words, and including a detailed statement of the facts. This judge was also aware of the effect of context: using active voice to place responsibility on the accused and acknowledge harm caused, while using passive voice can have the effect of removing the agent of the harm (and therefore relieving responsibility). But equally, when used in sentencing, the active voice can be interpreted as punishing rather than encouraging self-reflection.

Importantly, while equally concerned with clarity, judges aiming for –D equated this with accessibility. These judges also expressed a desire to articulate a clear picture of the law. However, they sought to do this in lay terms so that their lay audience could understand. The judges cited the use of ‘plain English’, implying avoiding legal jargon and generally complex language.

So, what is ‘clarity’ in judgment writing?

What judges see as ‘clarity’ in judgment writing appears to depend on who they are writing for. Judges seeking +D tend to see clarity as brevity and precision, while those seeking –D see clarity as accessibility. For example, while a judge seeking +D would prefer the concise latinate verb ‘implement’, a judge seeking –D would be more likely to prefer the more informal ‘put into place’.

But judges’ understanding of clarity could benefit from linguistic expertise. For example, phrasal verbs like ‘put into place’ are often challenging for ESL speakers and learners as they are idiomatic, contextual and often lack equivalents in other languages. This example highlights how ‘clarity’ and linguistic accessibility are more complex and subjective than the formal/informal binary described by the judges. Personal understandings of language—such as what is considered ‘plain English’— appear to offer little guidance on what is genuinely accessible to diverse audiences.

Bridging the Gap

These insights suggest that judges do think deeply about language, choosing tools to suit their audiences and communication goals of +D or –D. However, their grasp of linguistic accessibility appears limited, with notions like ‘plain English’ oversimplifying the complexities of clarity across varied audiences.

Additionally, it’s important to note that this distinction reflects general patterns I observed. While impartiality is a fundamental obligation of judges, many also saw compassion as essential to effective judgment-writing, and thus aimed for both goals. Balancing +D and –D simultaneously is a complex linguistic task, and several judges acknowledged the difficulty of navigating this fine line. Greater linguistic expertise could provide valuable tools to help judges manage this dual responsibility more effectively.

Ultimately, while judges demonstrate a practical understanding of language’s social consequences, their grasp of linguistic accessibility appears limited. Incorporating formal linguistic training into legal education could empower judges and lawyers to make more informed, accessible, and socially impactful linguistic choices.

Further reading

A reading from the course that provides further discussion of language in judgment writing: Desmond Manderson ‘Literature in Law – Judicial Method, Epistemology, Strategy and Doctrine’ (2015) 38(4) UNSW Law Journal 1300 https://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?collection=journals&handle=hein.journals/swales38&id=1328&men_tab=srchresults

An example of a judgment written with careful reflection on writing style and its consequences: A (Letter to a Young Person), Re (Rev 1) [2017] EWFC 48 (26 July 2017)

Screenshot of passenger being placed under suspicion on “Border Security”

Anyone who has ever travelled to or from Australia will agree that the last thing you want after getting off a long-haul flight is any further barriers between you and the outside world, a shower, and a bed.  However, given the ever-increasing securitization of borders across the global north, international travellers must first succeed in convincing border officials that they do not pose any type of threat to the nation.

This may be much easier for some people than others. In a recent study, we examined the various aspects of individuals’ language, identity and behaviour that are made salient by border officials in their work, when deciding whether particular people are suspicious or can be trusted. To explore this question, we collected and analysed 108 encounters between border officials and travellers arriving at Australian airports, filmed, produced and broadcast as part of the long-running, popular television series, Border Security: Australia’s Front Line.

In our new article, we show how in these encounters, border officials carry out evaluations of travellers’ credibility, much like those used in other migration processes, such as the assessment of asylum claims.  We find that different individuals are unequally positioned to construct a trustworthy identity based on the way they speak, their social capital, their (perceived or actual) nationality or ethnic origin, their knowledge, and material factors, like the clothes they wear, the money they have, or the other items in their possession.

Officer: (to camera) “This gentleman has arrived on an Italian passport. Speaking to him our officers realized that he’s not a native Italian speaker. The question is now what is his nationality.”

Screenshot of passenger being placed under suspicion on “Border Security”

These factors are made salient in ways that are unreliable and inconsistent, and we critically examine and denaturalize the problematic assumptions underlying them. For example, in the encounter above, Italian citizenship, a political/legal status, is imagined to involve specific social and linguistic experiences and practices, being born and raised in an Italian speaking context, to the exclusion of others, such as migration and naturalization.

In each case, we also compare how border officials are in a stronger position to mobilize the same categories of resources to construct identities for themselves that are trustworthy and credible.

This, we argue, is due largely to the privileged position they have on two different levels, both in terms of how they can control the discourse within their interactions with individual travellers, but also at the level of the television show, in how discourse about these interactions is produced and disseminated.

At the level of the encounters, officials obviously have a very specific role to play: they are the ones who decide who to stop, how to question them, what technologies to use, and, ultimately, how they interpret what they see and hear.

Officer: When we commenced our interview, I specifically stated to you that pursuant to Section 234 of the Migration Act, you’re required to provide me with truthful information. Can you demonstrate to me conclusively that you did work on that farm? I’ll give you this opportunity again, Declan, I’m a pretty fair sort of a guy.

Screenshot of passenger being placed under suspicion on “Border Security”

Not only this, but officers wield power over travellers in terms of the outcomes of these encounters: they may issue fines or warnings, cancel people’s visas and have them deported, or refer them for police investigation. This power undoubtedly influences the way travellers interact with them, and their perceived and actual levels of discursive agency.

However, the inequality does not end there: the television show itself produces discourse about traveller credibility, both in relation to the individuals who appear in the various encounters, but also in terms of the general messages that come from the combination of such interactions. At this level, we identify a range of discursive strategies, including giving the floor to officials to explain to camera the reasons for their suspicions and final decisions, and the use of an omniscient narrator who plays a similar role.

Such is the level of discursive inequality that, for instance, two friends returning to Australia after an overseas trip and going through passport control separately – as required for non-family groups – can become a “hidden” fact to be uncovered and construed as suspicious.

Narrator: Officers have just discovered what seems like a strange coincidence. A passenger at another bench has virtually IDENTICAL travel movements. […] Officers now suspect that these two passengers may in fact know each other.

Screenshot of passenger being placed under suspicion on “Border Security”

This adds another layer of credibility to officials’ border work: along with the show’s narrator, they have a chance to explicitly describe their reasoning processes and the accommodations they offer travellers, to perform procedural fairness for the viewing public.

At the same time, it also provides an additional opportunity to teach the viewing audience to suspect certain types of people and problematize certain attributes or behaviour. We learn, for instance, that people who hold an Italian passport should speak Italian natively, and that not doing so is cause for suspicion.

We learn that travellers from particular countries or ethnicities should be treated with a higher level of suspicion and that their behaviour or explanations require closer scrutiny. The two friends mentioned above weren’t just travelling together – they were travelling to countries in South-East Asia and are themselves of Asian ethnicity. These facts contributed to framing their trip together and their behaviour in the airport as suspicious, where these may otherwise appear completely innocuous.

This is apparent in the individual encounters themselves and how they are narrated, but this is also the case cumulatively, across the television show as a whole: non-white, non-Australian people and those who don’t speak English as a first language are overrepresented as travellers in the show, and can be contrasted with border officials who are predominately white, and “Australian-accented” English speakers (as we discuss in another article).

Screenshot of passenger being placed under suspicion on “Border Security”

Detection of wrongdoing is also overrepresented: in 61 percent of the encounters in our collection, there was a “guilty” outcome: people are detected, fined, have food or goods confiscated, or are arrested or deported. We can imagine that this is vastly disproportionate with the percentage of “wrongdoers” detected in reality. The combined effect of this is that viewers are taught that there is a high level of wrongdoing, meriting a high level of suspicion, and that this needs to be directed primarily at society’s linguistic and racial “others”.

These findings have implications beyond the television show itself: such discourses of suspicion have the potential to encourage viewers to take on personal responsibility for everyday bordering in their own social contexts. They also help to reinforce and garner trust in border policy, procedures and practices, even as it has moved towards criminalizing asylum seekers and other migrants and adopting a “culture of suspicion”.

References

Piller, I., Securing the border of English and Whiteness. Language on the Move, 8 November 2021, https://languageonthemove.com/securing-the-borders-of-english-and-whiteness/
Piller, I., Torsh, H., & Smith-Khan, L. Securing the borders of English and Whiteness. Ethnicities. 2023; 23:5, 706-725. https://doi.org/10.1177/14687968211052610
Smith-Khan, L., Five language myths about refugee credibility. Language on the Move, 6 May 2020, https://languageonthemove.com/five-language-myths-about-refugee-credibility/
Smith-Khan, L., Piller, I., Torsh, H. Trust at the border: identifying risk and assessing credibility on reality television. Journal of Law and Society. 2024; 51:4 513–538. https://doi.org/10.1111/jols.12505

Anthea’s new book is being launched at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, on the 20^th of November, with hybrid attendance options available. Event information and free registration are via this link: Judging Refugees: Narrative and Oral Testimony in Refugee Status Determination Tickets, Wed 20/11/2024 at 5:30 pm | Eventbrite

If you enjoy the show, support us by subscribing to the Language on the Move Podcast on your podcast app of choice, leaving a 5-star review, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Transcript

Laura Smith-Khan: Welcome to the Language on the Move podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Dr. Laura Smith-Khan and I’m a senior lecturer in law at the University of New England, Australia.

My guest today is Dr. Anthea Vogl, who is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Technology Sydney. Her research takes a critical interdisciplinary approach to the regulation of migrants and non-citizens, and she researches and teaches across refugee and migration law, administrative law and legal theory. She is currently co-leading an Australian Research Council Discovery Project grant on private refugee sponsorship in Australia and a national grant examining the health requirement imposed on non-citizens under Australian migration law.

Today we are going to talk about Anthea’s new book, Judging Refugees: Narrative and Oral Testimony in Refugee Status Determination, which is published by Cambridge University Press as part of their series, entitled Cambridge Asylum and Migration Studies.

I’ve read the book, of course, and recently reviewed it for the International Journal of Refugee Law. And, as I say in that review, I particularly appreciated how the book explores the “multiple ways narrative performance is implicated in (both) the conduct and the evaluation of refugee hearings”, and I described the book as “the most substantial and persuasive account to date of the impossible narrative demands placed on people seeking asylum.”

So on that note, Anthea. Congratulations on the book, welcome to the show, and thanks so much for joining us today.

Anthea Vogl: Thanks, Laura. It’s a real pleasure to be here, and thanks for that lovely introduction.

Laura Smith-Khan: My pleasure! To start, I’d like you to introduce the book for us, and perhaps you can explain a little more what it’s about.

Anthea Vogl: So the book really is about what we call refugee status determination. And for listeners who don’t exist in a legal framing, that’s really how the law comes to understand whether or not someone is going to be granted refugee status and believed to be the refugee, as they claim to be according to a particular legal definition.

That is the focus of the book that that question of what we do around refugee status determination at its most general. But the book is fundamentally about what happens when we put refugee status determination into practice, and there has been a lot of work done on refugee status determination. And we can talk in a minute about how, why, it’s such a difficult process, but a lot of the work that has been done on refugee status determination hasn’t necessarily had access to or been able to examine what is called the oral hearing, as part of that process.

A fundamental step in the refugee status determination process is where an asylum seeker comes before a decision maker to explain his or her claim. It’s really difficult to access those hearings. It’s really difficult, because of another thing that the book tries to do, which is to set refugee status determination within the broader context of the regulation of the border, and in particular, the incredibly violent and sometimes lethal means states have used to prevent refugees not from just getting to the border, but getting to that place where States are obligated to assess someone’s right to refugee status within their particular country or territory.

In looking at refugee status determination and the oral hearing, what the book tried to do was access some of those spaces that have been so hard to get into and ask, what happens when an applicant comes before a person empowered by the state to assess and judge their story? And how do those oral exchanges ultimately inform and determine that final decision that sometimes we have access to from the public records of refugee status determination bodies. Sometimes we don’t have access to that decision. And what is the relationship between those two things at a really prosaic level? You know, I was really interested in what is happening in the hearings, and then, more legally, I was interested in the relationship between the evidence that comes out in those hearings and what is finally decided. And at a critical level, a long standing critical engagement with the very premise of refugee law and the idea of border regulation, and only letting certain people cross borders on certain terms.

I was interested in the ways in which state written narratives about refugees, and who is an authentic refugee, and who deserves our protection, influences the kind of stories that are told in those hearings.

Laura Smith-Khan: Yeah, thank you so much. There are so many layers to this. And I really admire how well that you bring all those different threads and those different layers together in the book.

And personally, I can attest to how difficult it can be to access this type of research data – incredibly difficult to get permission to sit in and observe these types of hearings or be able to record them or to access recordings of them. So congratulations even on that first crucial step, especially in Australian context.

And it’s also worth pointing out that in a number of countries the hearings aren’t even usually recorded as an official procedural step, so recordings may not ever exist for hearings as well, and that raises a lot of questions about the accountability of those processes, too.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah. And tracking those gaps, I think is something that is a real challenge for researchers and I think it relates back to the secrecy and control that states seek to maintain over refugee issues and refugee law and practice. And actually, it’s a lot of your work, Laura, that I think has really nicely pointed out that even though – and this is a big part of the book, too, and a really nice intersection between our work – even though it’s the refugee who’s ultimately attributed with the testimony that they bring before decision makers, and they’re considered to be the author or the speaker, and then they are judged on that basis, your work has shown really carefully how actually, there are so many different voices, and so many different people who contribute to that particular testimony. And I’m thinking of your work and Katrijn Maryns’ work, and Marie Jacob’s work too.

And yet the refugee’s held responsible for that testimony in the end, and we have no way of tracing some of those processes, and how that comes about for a range of reasons, but also because it’s so hard to access the data.

Laura Smith-Khan: Yeah. And I think that’s where your work really comes in to provide a really good evidence base of what is going on behind the scenes, and also how you can have, on the one hand, these ideas of giving refugees a voice, or that, they’re “telling their story”, and that’s put forward as maybe increasing the legitimacy and fairness of the process. But what your book does so well is actually pulls apart what is happening, what is expected, and actually demonstrates so clearly how the demands or the expectations of a certain type of narrative, are controlled by the decision maker, ultimately, both within the hearing, and then also afterwards by the fact that they are the ones that take what has happened in the hearing and reframe it in their decision on both those levels the narrative is never really under the control of the asylum seeker. And that’s just such a great contribution to demonstrate that across all these different examples across Canada and Australia.

But I think maybe we should step back and give a little bit more overview of what the process looks like for someone if they’re seeking protection as a refugee in a country in the global north.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah, great. There’s a lot we could say about the content of refugee law and how it operates. But I think it might be useful to focus on the procedure for the purposes of the podcast.

Very briefly, there’s a definition in international refugee law, and it’s often imported into states that have become signatories to the Refugee Convention. Refugees have to prove that they face a well founded fear of persecution on one of five grounds, race, religion, ethnicity, and political opinion and particular social group.

What’s interesting there is that sense that the refugee has to give an account of their own fear on the basis of a particular ground, and that fear has to be both judged to be true on a subjective level, in that the refugee has to themselves have that well-founded fear, but it has to be objectively true, so it has to accord with a legal and evidence-based assessment of whether or not that person has or would have experienced, something to give rise to a fear in their country of origin.

As listeners, as you start to think through who refugees are and how they come before a decision making body in a global north state, what will probably spring into your mind is that people don’t necessarily come with access to the kinds of things that the law takes to be convincing and compelling in terms of forms of evidence. So someone’s fleeing their home state, and they are seeking to prove that their home state has persecuted them or harmed them, or people in their home state have persecuted or harmed them. The chance of being able to access those records, or having indeed left with written or documentary evidence of that having happened, is really slim.

Even where people leave with the most basic forms of documentary evidence which would help their claim. So really simple things, like even identity documents, even those identity documents are not necessarily the kinds of evidence, or they’re not in a category of what we talk about as probative evidence. We can’t even see prove that those written documents are authentic and true. And so there’s already this massive barrier to making a claim.

And in many ways the refugee status determination process and how it works both seeks to respond to that challenge – I think if we read in good faith the setting up of the refugee status determination process, it talks about having to give applicants the benefit of the doubt, because they don’t have other forms of evidence to build their claim for the purpose of the book. Why, that’s really important is because where we’re left is with both written and oral testimony, as the absolute foundation of how most refugees will make a claim before a court.

Sometimes there are other witnesses or people that someone might be able to call. That happens rarely, and sometimes people have had access to really good records, to substantiate their claim interestingly with social media and the digitization of some forms of evidence that’s like added a whole other interesting element to evidence that might be available. But to really summarize what happens, both at the first and sometimes second level of decision making. So before things are reviewed by courts, an asylum seeker comes before a decision maker. He or she or they may or may not have access to legal assistance, and both Canada and Australia are good examples. Without generalizing too much, even in the hearings, those who have access to a lawyer and a lawyer present, it really is the applicant giving testimony to the decision maker and the decision maker questioning and interrogating that evidence for most of the hearing.

And then, very importantly, the other person in the hearing, in almost all cases, is the interpreter. Keeping in mind another core challenge of refugee status determination, which you are, of course, very familiar with Laura, and will probably be of central relevance to listeners is that that the whole process happens across the applicant’s own language and the language of the host country, which are very rarely the same language, but sometimes they are. In all of the hearings that were included in the book, in both Australia and Canada, there was an interpreter present. In one of the hearings one of the applicants was confident with English, and the interpreter dipped in and out, but otherwise the interpreter was also the third voice in the hearing.

Laura Smith-Khan: Yeah, so you’ve got this really strong reliance on both written oral testimony, and very specific requirements in terms of the written testimony in terms of application forms, filling out a lot of different types of information. And there’s some great scholarship around how those different forms of testimony can also then be used to find inconsistencies. And these types of things come up in credibility assessment, too.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah, and it’s probably worth saying that one of those taken for granted bits of knowledge within refugee status determination and refugee law is that the claim is assessed on the basis of the substance of the claim. So it is assessed in terms of what is being told, and whether the decision maker finds those things to be plausible and true are a key part of that, and whether or not they accord with the legal framework, and also does your claim fit into what the law has said in your country, of where you’re seeking asylum a refugee is, or how it defines refugee.

But a key part of all refugee status determination, precisely because often of this absence of other evidence, is the credibility of the applicant and their evidence. So the applicant themselves, and the credibility of the story that’s being told, or the evidence being given, and credibility assessment in most countries turns on three main criteria: the idea of consistency and coherence that you just referred to and that’s consistency and coherence across multiple tellings. So you have to make sure that you are telling the same story again and again and again, which again, listeners can think about how difficult that is even just in the ordinary course of their own lives, not in an adjudicative setting.

The second criterion is plausibility, so is the story being told plausible. And then a third criterion that comes up is demeanour which has been really roundly criticized in a lot of jurisdictions, and I don’t necessarily address too much in the book, because I wanted to reinforce the ways in which, of all the criteria that have all been criticized, it’s the one, I think, with even less credibility than the other criteria.

But that credibility assessment is a key part of the claim, and it’s almost like a compulsory part of a lot of work on refugee status determination, that as scholars, we all know that decision making turns on the credibility of the applicant, much more so than it does on the legal and factual elements of the claim.

Laura Smith-Khan: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I think the demeanour one is quite interesting in the sense that. There is a stronger consensus that it’s not something that should be relied on. But then, maybe it still is, and it’s not explicitly mentioned, or in my own research, I found at least that it’s mentioned when it’s relied on positively. So for, you know, “there are some inconsistencies here, but this person in general seems, you know, authentic” and blah blah, So it can be used in somebody’s favour, and then maybe not mentioned when it goes against them, something along those lines.

But yes, absolutely, the different types of what have been called indicators of credibility. And it really is such a foundational and crucial part of the refugee status determination process

And it’s so important in how your analysis, looking at these different narrative demands, really brings out how credibility or incredibility can be produced through unrealistic expectations of this particular type of narrative, and also the way that the decision maker controls the hearing in such a way that it makes it really difficult for the person seeking asylum to actually perform as they’re required to perform. So I’m really looking forward into drilling down a little bit more into that process.

I’d really like to just briefly talk again about your data that you have. So we’ve already mentioned that you had access to hearings. But could you just explain to us exactly what type of data you collected, where, when and the challenges, you might have faced with that.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah, for sure. Essentially, the method at the core of the book was, what is maybe a bit counterintuitively called participant observation of hearings which, some listeners might be familiar with, but I mean, to just to encapsulate it, it was sitting in refugee hearings as they took place, without actively participating in them, beyond making my presence known and seeking permission to be in those spaces.

Interestingly, and relevant to our discussion earlier. All of my access to those spaces came by the refugee applicants themselves. And there was more hostility from the Australian refugee decision making space than the Canadian refugee decision making space in relation to my presence, even though under the relevant statute in Australia, the refugee applicant has the right to allow people into their own hearing, the tribunal, some way into the research, overrode that.

They also have the right to control who is and isn’t in the hearing. It’s a little bit legally grey. But it wasn’t a point I was going to pursue, obviously, in the really delicate and stressful context of someone having their claim assessed, when the Department said, “No, thank you. We don’t want you in the hearing anymore.”

That’s when I started to work with some audio transcripts and recordings of particular hearings in the Australian context. In the Canadian context, both through refugee applicants and through the UNHCR, I attended the hearings.

It’s important to note, I think, for the book, it’s work that came out of my doctoral project, and the hearings really have not, even though the last hearing that I attended was 2015, which doesn’t make it current data. And it’s not current work of mine, but it’s something I really wanted to come back to in terms of publishing and thinking about it. The one thing in thinking that through and thinking about. What does it mean that these hearings don’t continue on into the present day?

I tracked the history of the oral hearing itself. And what has happened to the oral hearing in both jurisdictions. And I guess one of the things that I came to in doing that was that there’s been a lot of reform around refugee status determination processing. And I argued primarily to make it faster and more efficient in ways that disadvantage the applicant.

But really what hasn’t changed. So those changes have happened around the oral hearing and the oral hearing has remained. This central fulcrum on which the whole process turns, and I would say, unfortunately, there’s even more pressure on the applicant getting their claim right in the oral hearing, because timelines have been shorter in the lead up to it, and appeal and review rights have gotten even more attenuated and limited.

So what that ended up as was 15 hearings across both jurisdictions along with the case files for the applicants. And, importantly, the decisions. Coming back to that earlier point, that really interesting question of what was said in the hearing? How did stories and language come up, and how are they assessed and tested? And then what did the decision makers say about what happened in the hearing? There were some really interesting gaps to follow through and comparisons to make.

So it was the hearings themselves, being in the hearings and observing them. And then the case files. And I really used that material to conduct pretty deeply qualitative assessment of what was going on in the hearings. And again, you know, you’re always thinking through methods and trying to be critical about your approach.

At the start, I was hoping to maybe look at one particular ground, or one particular kind of claim or claimant. But really some of those challenges of accessing the hearing influenced this final decision to look across claims and across claimants and across countries of origin.

And the other thing was, I guess what I was looking at was this sense of what was going on in the oral exchange, and the structure and procedure of the hearing so that helped make those things more comparable.

But I would like to really acknowledge work that I think has been really critical looking at particular kinds of claimants. So, LGBTIQ claimants, people making claims on the basis of gendered persecution, particularly women, particular political opinions coming out of particular countries of origin. I think that work’s been really important. I look at some stock stories and assumptions in the hearing and the way narrative works more generally, and they really drill down into the ways in which global north states require particularly racialised people to tell particular stories about themselves when they are, for example, a woman facing harm, or a queer person who hasn’t been able to live safely on the basis of sexuality.

Laura Smith-Khan: Yeah, I think I think that’s what’s so great about this quite broad and quite large collection of scholarship, as you say, is that everyone has had different kinds of access to different types of data and different conceptual frameworks as well and different methodologies, but actually so much of it complements each other so well. So we have that ability to draw on that scholarship, and then see how it applies to our particular context, our particular data in such really valuable ways.

And such a great reflection as well, on how, in the one sense, you could potentially-  See, your data is amazing, and I’m very jealous of it. But in terms of the small number of hearings that you got to observe. On the one hand, you could see it as like a gap or a lost opportunity to, as you say, drill down and look at a specific type of claim across a really large number of cases. But, on the other hand, it creates this really fantastic opportunity to look at that bigger picture across those particular hearings, and see what they have in common, or the patterns that you can see emerging from it.

And you’ve also done such fantastic conceptual thinking. And I really think, yeah, as you say, you acknowledge that this has come from your PhD research, which was a number of years ago. But I’m very grateful that you went ahead and did the book, because I think it’s a great contribution. But I also assume, based on my own experience of how my understanding of my research has changed over time, I assume that maybe your development of the concepts or the theories that you’d like to apply to this data has changed over time. Because I think that’s also a really important contribution in the book. The way that you bring in a number of different areas, a number of different theoretical frameworks, and use them to analyze your data.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah, that’s such a nice way of thinking about it. And it makes me reflect on the ways in which sometimes, yeah, your analysis can be latent, or you start with an idea, and the more you come back to your work. I think for me that sense of reading the hearing contextually and refusing to just individualise what was going on in the hearing, both in relation to the decision makers actually, and the applicants.

So not understanding that the decision makers have a lot of responsibility for how the hearing works, and your work has looked at this, too, Laura, the really limited ways in which credibility is actually governed, or how we define the credibility criteria themselves, how we understand them, and then how they are implemented and the responsibility the decision maker has leaves for some pretty big, capacious, billowy spaces of legal regulation.

But having said that, yes, coming back to the book, that sense of some of the structural forces at play, both in terms of narrative and language and in terms of the politicization of the hearings that has really continued in a pretty relentless way was important.

But yeah, I guess, as you say, in thinking about, you know the data that you have, and coming back to it, I’m wondering, you know, of its relevance. Some of the law and language work in this space, I guess it’s simpatico in particular ways, because you look at one hearing, and you can look at a paragraph within a hearing and really break down what is happening between, say, an interpreter and an applicant and a decision maker, and there’s so much going on at the level of understanding that even if the hearings were perfectly structured and the fairest possible versions of themselves, there would still be these incredible linguistic, cultural, and adjudicative or contextual barriers to understanding and communicating in that space.

Laura Smith-Khan: Yeah, absolutely. There are so many opportunities to look at the data on so many different levels and make sense of it in so many different ways. And, as you said, also contextualizing the hearings within their political and historical context as well. And I really enjoyed that chapter as well where you gave this overview of that exact thing across both Australia and Canada, and mapped some of the parallels, and also noted some of the differences. And also this really ironic or interesting tension, or seemingly contradictory pattern that emerges between, on the one hand, really, you bigoted, discriminatory, hateful political discussion about people seeking asylum on the one hand, and needing to control and stop their entry and deter them and punish them. And, on the other hand, at the same time, this development of what seems to be oh, we need to make the processes more fair, and you know, set them out in a bit more detail and have really good procedures. And there’s that weird tension, because those things are happening similar like simultaneously, it’s really quite interesting. So then you’re left with these processes that look very rigorous, trying to make sure that everyone’s accommodated, and we can communicate across language, barriers and all these things. But, on the other hand, it’s all happening against this really horrible kind of political discourse in the broader public space.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah, and trying, yes you say, there’s a real tension, and I think you know the book very much I guess aims to be a critical theoretical take on what’s going on in the hearings and what’s demanded of refugee applicants as testimony givers. But you know, as an advocate, and someone really committed to refugee justice on the ground I wanted to make really clear that we can’t lose sight of in the context is as it is a commitment to as fair a process as possible. Even if I’m you know, pretty directly critical of procedural fairness or improving credibility standards in this context as fixing the process. I don’t think it will, but the hearing itself and access to legal assistance and access to interpreters, you know, these are really fundamentally important things.

And when people had no ability to put their claims. So, looking at that history, you know, it comes from a complete, almost completely discretionary determination of people’s claims into what was a reform around individual rights to fair hearings both in Australia and Canada, and the right to be heard as a form of administrative justice and natural justice.

You know, I think, given the context, those things are really very important. But then, you see the way in which that individualizing feeds back into this broader narrative of authentic and inauthentic refugees, reinforces, and indeed generates and creates stories of genuine and credible asylum seekers as against bogus and unbelievable and incredible asylum seekers. And the person who bears the responsibility for that, you know, is sometimes, is the asylum seeker at the center of this assessment process regardless sometimes. Not always. You know there are some. There are concessions made, and I think, importantly, really important, research. Looking at the challenges, particular kinds of applicants facing, speaking their claims and narrating their claims.

But you know, generally, it’s the applicant that bears the responsibility of navigating that system and putting forward a claim that it is deemed to be credible. I think it’s important as scholars and thinkers that we don’t become inured or numb, or we stop forgetting how shocking that is. You know that, regardless of what an applicant has been through, or what testimony that they’re giving, their testimony must meet these particular standards of evidence giving, which I guess the book tries to draw on this the amazing literature at the intersection of law and psychology, which has said these are just, entirely unreasonable expectations to have of people’s language, and what the human memory can and can’t do generally. Just, you know, regardless of what might have happened to one person as an individual, but particularly in the context of anyone who suffered major violence, harm and trauma. And what that does to language.

Laura Smith-Khan: Absolutely. And that, yeah, we then still expect these individual people to be able to perform in these very, very specific ways.

Okay. So I think I would like to ask you a little bit in more detail now, because I’ve been hinting at this. What exactly is demanded, what types of different narratives or expectations did you find.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah. One thing that I that motivated the project and led to, I guess a series of findings was a bit of curiosity around what we mean when we talk about narrative in law and narrative studies and law and literature. So these bodies of work were really helpful, and I think particularly law and storytelling, which has come out of critical race theory and really looked at, you know, who gets to tell stories before the law who gets to judge them, and which ones are credible. For the refugee hearings and the book, I think drilling down into the specific narrative demands made of refugees, and the construction of narrative really informed the findings of the book.

Because it’s one thing to say, yeah. People, we demand stories. We demand people tell stories. But what does that mean? And why is it a problem, I think, for refugee applicants?

There are a couple of things. One, very significantly was that idea of a really Western narrative form which is temporarily located, even if it might not be chronological, that it’s sequenced in a way that is explicable. And that there’s a sense of most narrative studies talking one way or another about causation or connection between events and an accounting of that causation. So you can’t say, you know, “I went to the shop today, and tomorrow I brush my teeth.” That doesn’t make a narrative, because you’re meant to, you know, account for why you’re telling these things in a particular way, in a particular order, and someone might say that was out of order, because you should brush your teeth first.

So that sense of refugees being able to account for the connection between events in their lives and account for them in a way that – and this is a narrative, that coming from Western and Anglo European narrative studies – where there’s a real sense of not only being able to explain causality between events that happened to you, but that they should all come together in a sense of what’s sometimes called moral closure, a moral lesson or meaning. So a story has to have a particular meaning, and that that has to make sense. So that comes back to that credibility standard of plausibility. So it’s only plausible if you can sequence it, account for connections between events, and then provide some form of moral meaning or moral closure.

And this is the work of Marita Eastmond and a range of other really great critical non legal scholars often talking about refugee status determination. That’s not how things happen to people, and seeing that play out in the hearings was really apparent, making things make sense in a particular way, accounting for connections between events.

And then the other really important part of narrative studies as it connects to the work that I did, and what I saw in the hearings, was an accounting, a demand for refugees to account for themselves, like to understand themselves, and be able to really clearly explain how and why they did things, and to do that in a way that denied ambivalence, denied confusion, denied the impact of the circumstances that they were in that might have led to arbitrary decision, making or decision making that I can’t account for.

And then really, I wanted to say shockingly, but it was more infuriating, listening to decision makers wanting refugees to also account for other actors in their story. So you can imagine.

Laura Smith-Khan: Oh, my God! Yes.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah, it’s so. You know, this is where you start to see how literature helps us understand why this is a problem.

Work has been done on this in a more legal framing. But the idea that the applicant would have to account for the decisions of their persecutors. So if a persecutor let them, if someone was let out of jail, even though they were then you know they were then free of their captors. But then, say, re-imprisoned. If that didn’t make sense to the decision maker, the refugee had to account for why a state jailer might let someone free from arbitrary detention.

And again, the need to do that with clarity and certainty in order to reassure a decision maker in a sense of what might or might not be consistent or plausible, was really disturbing. And then I connected that to a narrative voice, or a particular version of the coming of age novel, or what gets called the Bildungsroman in German, because that’s where it’s said to come from. Which is the formation novel, which is like an all-knowing narrator. So if you did just.

Laura Smith-Khan: Omniscient.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah, exactly. So. It’s like the refugee applicant, in the hearings I observed, didn’t just have to tell a story that ended in this moral closure of becoming a refugee and a resolution to seek confidently seek refugee status. But along the way had to account for sometimes really minute aspects of the story that they themselves were part of, or that they were subject to as a narrator, in order to make the claim credible to a decision maker.

So to summarize that, I think, looking at the elements of narrative a little bit more theoretically, or looking at narrative structure, and then asking how they informed, or how they came up in the hearings, was a useful way to come back to a broader politics of storytelling and how it was operating in the hearing.

And I really appreciated, when you said earlier, you know, we assume that this right to tell one’s story is something that is a positive development and that, you know, being able to – and yes, storytelling itself has been cast as a really important part of, I think, campaigns for political justice, and I think that is true.

But there’s also a disciplining function of telling particular stories and people are disciplined into being certain kinds of subjects before the law, and it’s really clear the kinds of subjects refugees have to be in order to fit within the storytelling frame that decision makers accepted as true.

Laura Smith-Khan: Yeah, I when I was reading those parts of the book, I was – you know, waving my hands around and screaming almost. And I really appreciated like, because they resonated a lot with me, things that I’ve observed myself in work contexts.

But the theoretical frameworks that you had to work with from narrative studies and law and literature really helped name or you know, account for what’s happening there and why it’s so problematic. And it’s this, expectation, as you said, that we have somebody who not only has to account for themselves and explain why every single choice that they’ve made along the way is completely rational and well informed, and not emotional, or needs to be more emotional, or, you know, whatever the expectations are, but also that they have to account for every single other person who’s part of “their story” along the way, including sometimes even they’re persecutors.

Of course they can’t get inside the head of other people, and people do irrational things all the time. Or you know, there are motivations that we don’t understand informing why they make the choices that they do.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah.

Laura Smith-Khan: Yeah, just so problematic too.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah. And I think you know, what was really apparent was when that wasn’t. It happened in so many of the hearings that there were a couple of hearings that I point to where it’s like. Oh, no! There was a space for the applicant to express what happened without having to take responsibility for imbuing that with plausibility, sense, rationality, as you say, and like moral meaning.

And that burden of having to do that was was so conspicuous in its absence. Because you started to say, Oh, this is this could look significantly different. I think it wouldn’t solve all the problems or the fact that we still don’t have great indicia. We don’t have great ways to tell, to determine with any degree of certainty what truth is in these contexts.

But yeah, as you say, when it was there, it was just such a barrier to being able to just provide the evidence that was required of the applicants as they were coming before decision makers.

Laura Smith-Khan: Yeah, and something that a lot of the literature talks about especially in the Australian context, and perhaps also in the Canadian context, the idea that theoretically this is supposed to be an inquisitorial process where the decision maker is responsible for, you know, searching around for evidence and helping to produce the evidence. But in reality, at least in these particular contexts, it does seem quite adversarial. Right? That’s maybe a reflection of our particular legal systems.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah. And I think again, yeah, narrative theory was helpful in thinking through the different reasons we tell stories and the different settings that we tell them in, and how that will inflect the story that’s being told, what can be said, what can’t be said, how we might imagine an audience receives our testimony or testimony more generally.

And I think one of the things that became apparent in thinking through this idea of a narrative occasion is that it’s not easy to tell one’s story to begin with. But if there is a context in which a decision maker is also impeding your ability to meet these narrative standards. Then I guess that’s when for me the argument about credibility and decision making spaces as gatekeeping comes together because one of the findings and I think this has come through in other people’s work because it’s clear in decisions.

So a lot of work in the credibility space has also looked at the written reasons and written decisions. But people that I observed, the hearings that I observed, applicants were asked to tell the story and to meet some of these standards that we’ve just spoken about. And then the hearing itself did all of these things to just make that actually impossible. So even if the applicant could meet those demands the behaviour of a decision maker, the norms-

And so again, not necessarily bringing this home to individual decision makers because I didn’t- it wasn’t an ethnography of decision making. I didn’t have a quantitative number of, it wasn’t a quantitative study of how decision makers behave.

But the norms, as you say, around how the hearing is conducted was not to open up a space where someone could present narrative on their own terms, and then be judged on the on the terms of the decision maker and hearing it was instead, I guess what I observed was fragmentation decision makers interjecting themselves into applicant’s stories and actually asking exactly the kinds of questions that even the very limited guidance, legal guidance, or usually policy guidance, on credibility that exists, asking those kinds of questions. So the guidance that we have generally says it’s not uncommon for people to forget dates. It’s not uncommon for memory to be interrupted by traumatic events. And so that’s all there.

And yet, you know, decision makers really pushing for “did this”, not just “did this happen before or after this other thing?” But you know, “when did this happen? What year was it? You earlier said it was early in the year. Now you’re saying it was October. Why are you doing that?” So really interrogating and looking for moments where the credibility criteria wasn’t being met against the credibility guidance, such as it is, that exists.

So yeah, that that sense of the inquisitorial hearing was absolutely, apart from, I would say two of the hearings that I observed, just really absent from the hearings that were part of the study.

Laura Smith-Khan: Yeah. So even where there are guidelines with very specific advice, the fact that they just seem to be routinely overlooked or ignored is yeah, very, quite concerning yeah. And you’ve touched on another really important chapter in your book in terms of the conduct of the hearing and the fact that we have this idea of applicants having the space, and the floor, I guess, in communication to be able to just say things, tell their story. But what that actually looks like in terms of the hearing structure can be very different.

And I think you talked about the difference between Canada and Australia as well in terms of the order of the hearing.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting. There was a similar kind of unpredictability around how the hearings went. So I guess that was another finding. And I must say, I attended hearings first in the context of, before coming to research, in the context of refugee advocacy.

And I really did, I think it’s not naive to think that if you have a hearing where a refugee believes that his or her or their story is being assessed that they will be able to tell their story. I mean, I look back on it, and I think it’s naive. It feels a bit naive, but, as you say, it’s like, well, here’s the space. It’s an open space, tell your story. It’s not how it works.

Sometimes the Canadian hearings, even though they were, they sometimes they made much clearer that they were just going to interrogate aspects that the decision maker found implausible, or the aspects of the decision maker was concerned to get more information about. And that was done more predictably. So, even though it wasn’t this open space for storytelling on one level, that benefited applicants because they were told what was coming at them

In the Australian hearings, a little bit about how the hearing is introduced, or how the decision maker sets up the hearing, when the applicant walks in and begins the hearing and it was, it was still- You know, an applicant would still be forgiven for thinking they’re about to be able to tell their story, and to do that in something of a chronological way. What we sometimes would call just for shorthand, and maybe even non lawyers know this, the idea of evidence in chief. So you get to tell your story before someone tests it. That really didn’t happen in any of the hearings that I observed.

And so the that sense of being able to create coherence and create plausibility was denied to the applicant, even though you know a lot of work on law and language and credibility in the hearings and Law and Psych has pointed out, it’s, you know there are barriers to doing that, in any event.

Laura Smith-Khan: Yeah, I think it’s probably worth just as a slight aside to explain to listeners who aren’t familiar with the setting that in the Australian context that the hearings that you were observing were a second hearing. So there’d already been an application process, and there’d already been an interview with the Immigration Department, and that hadn’t gone well, and the particular person had been, you know, rejected. They had their claims rejected. And then, after that, the second stage hearing was with a review body that looks at the whole claim afresh. So they aren’t supposed to just look at the first decision, and see whether that was done correctly, but actually look afresh at any fresh claims, or you know what’s happened since then, and the whole claim. So on the one hand, there could potentially be the expectation that they’re just reviewing the existing record. But ideally they would give the applicants a complete fresh chance to share their story, as it were.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah, yeah, that’s always. I teach a refugee law clinic. And it’s always so difficult to explain to students that this process is meant to be fresh review of the original decision, so just a rehearing of the decision as it was first made. And of course that’s not what happens in the hearings, and as advocates you’re always you’re already, and the book talks a little bit about and there’s been great work done by Jesse Hambly and Nick Gill and others about the role of lawyers, and also a lot of the law and language schools, too. Great recent piece by Katrijn Maryns and Marie Jacobs about the role of lawyers and their politics.

But I think, what really comes through when you’re looking at the way in which the hearings operate, and what the applicant can and can’t say is that there’s no version where there’s an ability to clearly articulate your story on your own terms. And so you then, you’re just fed back into this process where the decision maker is picking up on things that he or she has already observed as a problem with your narrative.

Laura Smith-Khan: Yep. Starting from that point of problem or distrust.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah.

Laura Smith-Khan: To somehow work from that back footed position, which is, yeah, a whole different challenge.

Yes. Wow. So yeah, I think it was valuable to read about your reflections in terms of you know. What does all this mean for our ability to make an impact? And you know, what is it? Does this lead us to any kind of suggested reform? Or you know, what does this all mean, especially when we’re looking at that broader question of structural unfairness, that really comes out so clearly in the book.

Do you have any hope?

Anthea Vogl: I mean, look. One thing, that without being a prescription of reforms to fix the process which the book just, you know, is really open about that. That’s not. That would be that would come out of, or that some of these observations would hope to inform that maybe accepting that some of the broader political challenges, or that the reforms have to take place in light of attention to the idea that there’s some, if we have in Australia, and you know Canada does its own share of this increasingly with the US-Canada border.

If we have a regime that’s willing to exert such brutal violence on people seeking to cross the borders and make an asylum claim, what does it mean, then, to demand, or how do we understand that alongside, is a real question. I think a very sincere and genuine quest of many scholars, advocates, lawyers, decision makers to make this process fair and equitable.

I think that they’re the two really hard things to hold within the frame together. I mean that, having been said, I do think the interdisciplinary work that has been done on the problems with the process. And I am not just saying this because we’re conducting a law and language podcast you know the work that has been done by law and language, and like law and, the intersection of law and language attending to what goes on in the hearing, and how decisions are made.

The other interdisciplinary, that big body of interdisciplinary work, looking at the intersection between law and psychology, and trying to really understand how these incredibly unfair and incorrect, you know, just blatantly incorrect inferences are drawn in the hearings, gives me hope.

Because I don’t think, you know –  I think there is a gap between the politics and also the will of decision makers and decision making bodies to make good decisions. That having been said, you know, I think that site of interdisciplinary knowledge is crucial for understanding legal processes here. I don’t think we get very far with a legal analysis of refugee decision making.

So in that kind of sense of grounding reforms, I think it’s really important. And the other thing that I do think, and I try and talk about this at the end of the book, if we are stuck with this process, if we, and I know a lot of things are on the horizon, including AI and Automated decision making, which will require us as researchers and advocates interested in justice for good decision making and refugee justice, we’ll have to engage with those things.

But I think if the hearing is in its current form, working hard to preserve the quality of the procedure and people’s access to good legal advice and proper interpreters and proper timelines before and after the hearing is part of the struggle in the interim.

I think there’s really good work. I do think the critical work which has just really come at credibility as lacking. I mean your own work. But really, the critical cultural studies work about the problems with all of these stereotypes that exist within credibility assessment.

Even at the level of international NGOs, maybe not yet government, there is a real consensus that credibility is dysfunctional, like the credibility assessment process is not working, and I do hope that they will work on that, that there will be an ability to really think of something. I don’t think that will solve the problems, but it affords a little bit more justice in these testimonial spaces and spaces of decision making.

Laura Smith-Khan: Yeah, for sure. While ever we’re working within the existing system, it is really heartening to see, I think, at least at an individual level, lawyers and also decision makers being quite receptive to that type of interdisciplinary research.

Anthea Vogl: Interest.

Laura Smith-Khan: And I guess we just all have, you know, a kind of quite hefty duty and responsibility to communicate it to them in ways they are going to take it on and use it productively within the problematic context in which we we’re all doing our work.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah, I mean, yeah. So true. I mean, sometimes I catch myself. I’m not pessimistic. But I’m kind of you know, I think it’s important to always think politically and contextually. And you know, I was like, I just don’t think, you know, coming to a pretty negative conclusion. But like, yeah, towards the end of the book.

Anthea Vogl: Gregor Noll recently also wrote something, so a scholar of credibility and refugee assessment for a long time, reflecting on whether or not we can make RSD work in the context of the current credibility standards, and I think the work of Jane Herlihy, who has also engaged with this.

And you know that there’s just a really clear no, you know, there’s not a reformist agenda. I don’t think that works around the credibility assessment, the current credibility criteria, as they’re currently expressed. And then what that looks like in these hearings. So even though I don’t mean to be, I was like, “am I being too pessimistic?” You know “is it too much of a harsh conclusion?” But I think that kind of consensus, and then the receptiveness of at least trying to think of other ways, to approach testimony is hugely important. Unless we really take seriously the problem of individualized status determination which I don’t think states will be doing away with anytime soon.

Laura Smith-Khan: Yes, absolutely. I think I personally felt that you did a really good job of very explicitly, you know, drawing a line, really making it clear that you know it’s not just enough to walk away from reading this book and say, “Oh, well, you know, we can just tweak this little bit, or just avoid doing that particular thing, or requiring this, or don’t interrupt,” or you know these little things that we can check off the list, and then everything’s going to be fine, not enough. And we can’t accept that as good enough. And I think that’s a really powerful and important statement to walk away from with this book.

I thought it was really well expressed. And yeah, it is very easy to just fall into cynicism when you’re working in this space, but also to be able to say specifically, you know, these are the things that I’m identifying in this work. This is what other people are identifying. This is what we can say within this system, but to acknowledge that the system is fundamentally flawed within itself, and while ever it exists, as it is, there’s a limit to achieving the ultimate goal of, you know truly fair processes and affording everyone protection when they need it. Yeah, hopefully, that’s not too glum.

Anthea Vogl: No. And I think, yeah, I’m reminded of yeah, of Hilary Evans Cameron’s work, who’s worked in this space. And you know, she really reinforces that in the search for truth that our focus should be on – the state’s focuses on the danger of a false positive, you know, giving someone status when they “shouldn’t” have been given status because they didn’t have a real claim. And you know, like shifting the focus to actually, a false negative. You know? How do we actually attend to the ways in which decision making that should be the focus of our concerns, given what refugee law regulates and what’s at stake in these decisions.

Laura Smith-Khan: Absolutely. I find that argument, I’ve heard that one from her as well, so persuasive that it’s much more important to protect against or avoid false negatives, you know rejections that shouldn’t have been rejections rather occasionally, you know, “letting someone in” who, you know, doesn’t “deserve our protection”. And I’ve spoken with lawyers as well, who make a parallel between this particular setting and credibility and the criminal law. You know, we give people the benefit of the doubt. We assume someone is innocent until proven guilty rather than the other way around, and the stakes are just as high or arguably higher in this particular setting. So why not try something similar here? Yeah.

If we can address the larger socio-political context in which all of it…Yeah, to to be worked on today and in the future.

Anthea Vogl: That small problem. Yeah.

Laura Smith-Khan: Thanks so much for speaking with me today, Anthea, and congratulations once again on this really incredible contribution that you’ve made to this very important scholarship. I understand that you have a book launch which is coming up fairly soon. Could you share the details with us?

Anthea Vogl: Yeah, so the book came out earlier this year. But these things take more time than you anticipate. So on the 20th of November here. I’m currently, I should have said, I’m so sorry I should have said I’m here in Gadigal land, on Gadigal Land, in Sydney. We are having a book launch at the Centre for International Law and the Centre for Criminology, Law and Justice at UNSW. And the UNSW Kaldor Centre would have the details and the registration link. So I’m really looking forward to that. I’m grateful to those centres for launching the book, and it’ll be just an hour discussion at 5.30 in a few weeks from now.

Laura Smith-Khan: Yeah, it’s not too far away, I think hopefully, we will have this podcast up and published before then, so we can publicize it. And I’ll be able to include a link to the invitation.

Anthea Vogl: Amazing. That’d be great. And it is also a hybrid for people who are listening from places other than Sydney, it’s a hybrid event. So there’s an online attendance option.

Laura Smith-Khan: Fantastic. Thank you so much. Thanks again.

Anthea Vogl: Thank you. Thanks for such wonderful questions, Laura, and you are absolutely the best person for engaging with the book. So it’s been really a pleasure to speak to you about it.

Laura Smith-Khan: So wonderful to read it, and thanks for taking the time to discuss it with us, and thanks everyone for listening. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice and recommend the Language on the Move podcast and our partner, the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends. Till next time!

References

Berg, Laurie & Millbank, Jenni (2009). Constructing the Personal Narratives of Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Asylum Claimants. Journal of Refugee Studies, vol. 22, no. 2, pp. 195-223.

Eastmond, Marita (2007). Stories as Lived Experience: Narratives in Forced Migration Research. Journal of Refugee Studies, vol 20, no. 2, pp. 248-264.

Evans Cameron, Hilary (2018). Refugee Law’s Fact-Finding Crisis: Truth, Risk and the Wrong Mistake (Cambridge University Press).

Hambly, Jessica & Gill, Nick (2020). Law and Speed: Asylum Appeals and the Techniques and Consequences of Legal Quickening. Journal of Law and Society, vol. 47, no. 1, pp. 3-28.

Herlihy, Jane & Turner, Stuart W (2009). The Psychology of Seeking Protection. International Journal of Refugee Law, vol. 21, pp. 171-192.

Jacobs, Marie & Maryns, Katrijn (2022). Managing Narratives, Managing Identities: Language and Credibility in Legal Consultations with Asylum Seekers. Language in Society, vol 51, no. 3, pp. 375-402.

Noll, Gregor (2021). Credibility, Reliability, and Evidential Assessment, in C Costello, M Foster & J McAdam (eds), The Oxford Handbook of International Refugee Law (Oxford University Press), ch. 33.

Smith-Khan, Laura (2019). Why Refugee Visa Credibility Assessments Lack Credibility: A Critical Discourse Analysis. Griffith Law Review, vol 28, no. 4, pp 406-430.

Vogl, Anthea (2024). Judging Refugees: Narrative and Oral Testimony in Refugee Status Determination (Cambridge University Press)

Master of Applied Linguistics and TESOL students at Macquarie University (Image credit: Jung Ung Hwang)

As pre-pandemic levels of migration have been restored or exceeded, international students are once again in the spotlight.

Canada is planning to cap international student visas and Australia plans to raise English language proficiency requirements for student visas. The stated rationale is to “improve the quality of students’ educational experience and reduce workplace exploitation” and to “support international students to realise their potential.”

I argue that raising the English proficiency requirements for university admission is not a good way to achieve the stated rationale. International students’ educational experience and their successful integration into the workforce can be improved in a different way.

Why are language proficiency tests used for university admission?

A certain level of language proficiency is undoubtedly required to be able to study in a degree program.

However, standardized language proficiency tests that are designed to be used on a large scale, are, in fact, not good predictors of academic success, and are not viewed as such by university teaching staff and other stakeholders. After all, language proficiency is just one aspect of the many facets that contribute to students’ academic achievement.

Furthermore, language testing is administered selectively and not every applicant’s  language proficiency gets tested, entrenching inequality between different student groups from the outset.

Why is language proficiency testing not enough?

Successful communication depends on many factors, including the communication skills and supportiveness of the interlocutor. In standardized English language proficiency test situations, the interlocutors are trained assessors, who focus on language skills, fluency, and accuracy in a controlled test environment. In real life, however, interlocutors are not trained language experts and not necessarily supportive either, as adult language learners experience all too often.

Here’s an example from Yumiko, a Japanese international student featured in the forthcoming book Life in a New Language. In the first few months of her time in Australia, Yumiko only ordered orange juice because hospitality staff could not understand her Japanese accent when she said ‘apple juice’ (probably sounding like “apuru juice”). Not only did she not achieve the desired result but interlocutors often responded to her in an unkind way. This is an example of a social situation that isn’t academic in nature; however, unfortunately, international students do get judged as competent or incompetent in such situations, which of course, has very real consequences for them.

While language proficiency tests give an indication of general language proficiency, it would be unrealistic to expect them to replicate all the potential language use situations in a university student’s life. Therefore, raising the language test score requirements for university study is unlikely to significantly improve students’ educational experience.

How do we improve student experience then?

Instead of having a higher score on a standardized language proficiency test, what truly helps improve the students’ educational experience is language support and experiential learning that enable them to function in their future workplaces. Language support should be provided to all students with a dual purpose: on the one hand, to assist with their studies – as a more immediate need – and on the other, to gain effective communication skills for employability.

Besides the generic university-wide academic language support that most universities provide, discipline-embedded language support can be provided to all students and not just international students. This is to avoid the ‘sink-or-swim’ approach that they experience in higher education.

At the same time, valuing and building on the multilingual repertoires of students can provide a superior learning experience for all. An inclusive environment clearly benefits all. Engaging with languages in their studies and classes opens up new ways of knowledge production for students. For instance, in a recent seminar activity on the topic of wellbeing for language teachers, my class explored two Japanese concepts as part of the seminar activity. This led to an interesting discussion on what other wellbeing concepts there are in other languages and what we can learn from them.

Preparing students for the workplace

Furthermore, students need to be prepared for workplace requirements both linguistically and by building skills and connections through work-integrated learning (WIL). Learning activities that require students to research and engage with professional bodies are a good start to build awareness and language skills. This can then lead to learning activities and assessment practices that require industry project participation. For instance, Applied Linguistics and TESOL students at Macquarie University design language testing activities for English language schools as part of a unit I teach on language assessment.

In conclusion, setting up additional barriers to admission does not support students. What does support students is creating safe spaces with supportive interlocutors where they can simultaneously grow their linguistic repertoires, their disciplinary knowledge, and their workplace skills.

References

Bodis, A. (2017). International students and language: opportunity or threat? Language on the Move. Retrieved from https://languageonthemove.com/international-students-and-language-opportunity-or-threat/
Bodis, A. (2021). The discursive (mis) representation of English language proficiency: International students in the Australian media. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 44(1), 37-64.
Bodis, A. (2021). ‘Double deficit’ and exclusion: Mediated language ideologies and international students’ multilingualism. Multilingua, 40(3), 367-392. doi:doi:10.1515/multi-2019-0106
Bodis, A. (2023). Gatekeeping v. marketing: English language proficiency as a university admission requirement in Australia. Higher Education Research & Development, 1-15. doi:10.1080/07294360.2023.2174082
Bodis, A. (2023). Studying abroad is amazing, or is it? Language on the Move. Retrieved from https://languageonthemove.com/studying-abroad-is-amazing-or-is-it/
Piller, I., & Bodis, A. (2023). English Language Proficiency for Australian University Admission. YouTube. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUSqSSploSE
Piller, I., & Bodis, A. (2024). Marking and unmarking the (non)native speaker through English language proficiency requirements for university admission. Language in Society, 53(1), 1-23. doi:10.1017/S0047404522000689
Piller, I., Bodis, A., Butorac, D., Cho, J., Cramer, R., Farrell, E., . . . Quick, B. (2023). Submission to the Joint Standing Committee on Migration Inquiry into ‘Migration, Pathway to Nation Building’. Canberra: Parliament of Australia. Retrieved from https://www.aph.gov.au/DocumentStore.ashx?id=8c0d9316-2281-4594-9c7b-079652683f54&subId=735264

***

Source: Australian Museum

Editor’s note: This week (Nov 08-15) we are celebrating NAIDOC week. “NAIDOC” stands for “National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee.” The theme of this year’s NAIDOC week is “Always was, always will be” in recognition of the fact that First Nations people have occupied and cared for the Australian continent for over 65,000 years. Indigenous Languages have been a inextricable part of this history. Yet the value of Indigenous Languages continues to be denied, as Gerald Roche and Jakelin Troy show here.

***

A New Era for Indigenous Languages?

Despite decades of research and public outreach demonstrating the importance of Indigenous languages, negative attitudes about the maintenance and revitalization of these languages persist among the general public in Australia. Here, we argue that we need to think about the tenacity of these negative attitudes as a form of denial, like climate denial or genocide denial. We also argue that now is a crucial time to confront that denial.

2019 was nominated by the UN as the International Year of Indigenous Languages, and the years 2022-2032 have been nominated as the decade of Indigenous languages. These high-profile international mega-events seemingly promise a coming era of unprecedented attention to and support for Indigenous languages.

This promise extends to Australia. We joined in the International Year of Indigenous Languages, with numerous activities organized by the Department of Communication and the Arts. The Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies recognized 2019 as an “opportunity for all Australians to engage in a national conversation about Indigenous languages.”

Source: Australian Museum

Australia is the only country in the world that has a national schools curriculum that supports the teaching of all its Indigenous languages. ‘The Australian Curriculum Languages – Framework for Teaching Aboriginal Languages and Torres Strait Islander Languages’ provides for every school in Australia to teach one or more Australian languages—the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages. In spite of this historic development in our education system, most Australians seem to be oblivious or, worse, hostile to Australian languages. Plans are now afoot to take part in the coming decade of Indigenous languages, but how will Australia support Australian languages?

Ongoing trends and recent events in Australia suggest that significant challenges lie ahead. The Third National Indigenous Languages Report, published in August this year, found that most of Australia’s Indigenous languages are highly ‘endangered,’ while only a small and declining number (currently 12) are considered ‘strong.’ Meanwhile, recent efforts to bolster the role of English, seen in new regulations enforcing English requirements for partner visas, have strengthened problematic associations between the English language and Australian citizenship. And most disturbingly, we continue to see the destruction of Indigenous heritage by both commercial and state parties.

All of this suggests that Australia must still confront massive social and political barriers if Indigenous languages are going to flourish. As the analysis below demonstrates, denial of the importance of Indigenous languages and the reality of their revitalization persists, and are expressed in public forums with surprising impunity.

Indigenous Languages and the Australian Public  

Source: Australian Museum

We undertook a preliminary analysis of comments made on five articles in the Conversation, published between August 2014 and July 2020; the data we analyze is available here. These articles focused on different aspects of the maintenance and revitalization of Indigenous languages in Australia. We collated a total of 49 comments from them.

We began by classifying the comments into negative, positive or both/neither regarding their view of Indigenous languages. We found that  21 (42.8%) of the comments were unambiguously negative in their appraisal, while 14 (28.5%) were positive; the remaining were either neutral or ambiguous.

We then examined the negative comments for recurrent themes that were used to justify and rationalize these views. We found five major themes: language revitalization is impractical; it harms Indigenous people and communities; revitalized languages are inauthentic; government support for Indigenous languages is inappropriate, and; English should be promoted instead of Indigenous languages. Each theme is examined in turn below.

Commentators suggested that it was “impractical,” “absurd,” or not “feasible” to maintain and revitalize Indigenous languages, or that these languages are “doomed,” and therefore any interventions were useless. Some commentators took a modified position, suggesting that the proposed methods, rather than revitalization itself, were impractical. One commentator attempted to demonstrate the impracticality of supporting Indigenous languages with a hypothetical scenario: a factory in an “Aborigine area” where all signage would have to be in English as well as “the various Aboriginal languages/dialects,” leading to an unsafe work environment.

Another theme was that maintaining and revitalizing Indigenous languages is harmful. Some suggested that supporting Indigenous languages has adverse economic impacts, primarily because English is the language of economic advancement: “English, in Australia must be the language of the classroom as it will be the key to the factory, office and other workplaces.” Others stressed that supporting Indigenous languages would isolate Indigenous people: from the rest of society, in remote locations, and in the past. Support for Indigenous language was associated with Indigenous people living “in the desert, isolated from mainstream society,” “condemned” to becoming a “living museum,” unable to “appreciate their links to people in other regions.” A variant of this argument was that providing support for language revitalization takes funds away from communities where Indigenous languages are strong.

Source: Australian Museum

Commentators also employed a ‘bootstraps’ argument, insisting that government interventions in Indigenous languages were inappropriate because communities should take sole responsibility for their languages. One commentator stated that “The real responsibility lies within each community to promote language usage,” while another emphasized the need for “a grass roots commitment within the community.” This point was often stressed by making comparisons with successful efforts of migrant communities to maintain their languages in Australia. These comments seemingly imply that if Indigenous communities need government support, it is because they are either unwilling or unable to maintain their languages themselves.

A fourth theme in the negative comments focused on issues of authenticity. It was argued that the languages, speakers, or the use of languages were, essentially, fake. Regarding revitalized languages, it was argued that, “We don’t know what the languages were really like,” and that we can “never know” their pronunciation. Not only were the languages described as fake, but it was also asserted that, “Aboriginal people are really English speakers.” Finally, the use of such languages is also deemed inappropriate in the modern world, in places that “are now completely covered in concrete, industry, and modern life.”

A final theme was that English should be prioritized. The importance of English was sometimes suggested to derive from its official status: “English is the official language in Australia.” More often, it was suggested that English ‘simply is’ the dominant language, and that prioritizing it is mere realism: “Living in Australia means speaking English.” One commentator also suggested that English is a “very rich language,” that contains “the words needed for modern, global life.” This suggests that Indigenous languages are, by contrast, ‘poor’ and have vocabularies unsuited to ‘modern, global life.’

Source: Australian Museum

Understanding Denial

All the positions outlined above constitute denial insofar as they are counterfactual. In contrast to what these commentators suggest, language revitalization is thriving in Australia. Many languages of the south east and south west of Australia have come back into active use after more than one hundred years of dormancy. One such language is Kaurna of the Adelaide Plains, not spoken for more than one hundred years when its community began to reconstruct the language from sparse memories and some historic documents, assisted by linguist Rob Amery. It is now a thriving language with its community using the language on a daily basis for casual and formal communication. It began with the community wanting to teach the language in their schools and this continues today.

Rather than harming Indigenous people, language revitalization is linked to increased wellbeing. In talking about the renewal of Kaurna and other languages, Kaurna educator Stephen Goldsmith says, “When we’re talking about the Aboriginal culture, we’re talking about the cultural heritage of every Australian…When people go into communities they start to understand the depth and the knowledge of Aboriginal people and how we operate as part of the environment.”

Although language revitalization requires commitment from the community, it also requires government support, in both policy and funding. And languages that have undergone renewal of their use as community languages are as real and authentic as any language. Finally, English is not Australia’s official language nor is it an Australian language; it is a language of Australia, imported like the many others that are now languages of Australia.

Source: Australian Museum

These are all established facts, accessible to anyone who cares to look. There are debates about details, but not basic truths. Therefore, if the comments we analyze are expressions of ignorance, it is willful ignorance. More than merely counterfactual, however, these arguments are also denialist in the sense that they aim to obstruct a course of action that is suggested by those recognized facts. In this case, they aim to justify and rationalize an unjust status quo that Indigenous people have persistently spoken up against.

The denialist arguments described above follow a common pattern shared with denialist efforts to suppress language revitalization elsewhere. However, they also exist in a uniquely Australian context, and an important aspect of this context is anti-Indigenous racism. A recent survey found that three quarters of Australians hold ‘implicit bias’ against Indigenous people, and the Online Hate Prevention Institute has tracked rising anti-Indigenous racism in Australian online space, particularly following this year’s Black Lives Matter protests.

We need to better understand the relationships between anti-Indigenous racism and the denialist positions described here.

If the UN decade of Indigenous language is going to truly help Indigenous languages in Australia flourish, it will be essential to understand both the extent of denialist sentiments, and the complex ways they interact with the wider political context. Broad public support will be essential to promoting Indigenous languages: to create a safe space where Indigenous people can undertake the difficult and emotional work of reclaiming their languages; to protect communities and individuals from backlash; to ensure that funding is secured and its use supported; and as an essential part of any political change within our democratic political system.

To win this support, we have to stop denying the existence of denial, try and better understand how and why opposition to Indigenous language revitalization exists, and explore how it might be countered.

In a world where public debates about refugees and asylum seekers often focus on whether they are telling the truth, it should probably come as no surprise that government processes for evaluating asylum claims emphasize assessing applicant credibility.

These credibility assessments have – rightly – attracted ample criticism from scholars across multiple disciplines for many years now. From the earliest critiques, scholarly commentary has acknowledged that the asylum process is a site of intercultural communication and suggested that many of the issues with credibility assessment relate to this. Credibility assessment guidance itself also acknowledges that asylum seekers have different social and cultural backgrounds to those of decision-makers and includes suggestions on how to accommodate these differences.

Focusing on communication makes sense, given that the indicators used to measure asylum seekers’ credibility generally relate to communication. These include evaluating asylum seekers on how consistently they communicate across various interactions and written texts (internal consistency), and how well their narrative aligns with officially preferred sources of knowledge relating to their home country and social group. Officials may also refer to the level of detail in their communication, and even to their demeanor, when explaining whether or not they find them credible.

In my doctoral research, I brought a fresh angle to scrutinizing these processes by critically examining the discourses about language, communication and diversity underlying the credibility assessment guidance provided to Australian officials reviewing refugee visa applications, as well as a collection of publicly available decisions. By conducting a critical discourse analysis I uncovered a set of problematic language myths on which these credibility assessments rely.

Language myth #1: Texts are produced by individuals in isolation

The first language myth is that individuals, in this case asylum seekers, can produce (written or spoken) texts alone. This false assumption leads to the idea that it is legitimate and possible to analyse and compare texts attributed to asylum seekers to determine whether their performance demonstrates credibility.

This is highly problematic because texts produced in the process of applying for asylum are closely dictated by legal and procedural requirements. They are also the product of the interaction of a variety of actors, such as the officials who ask questions and determine the conduct and content of interviews, legal advisors who sometimes speak and often write on behalf of their clients and offer them a range of advice on what to say and how. They may even be the products of multiple languages when interpreters are involved.

Language myth #2: A truthful narrator has one single story

The second language myth is that a truthful narrator will recount an event or other information consistently over time, and across different contexts. This false assumption leads to the idea that isolated fragments of text, removed from their original context, can provide evidence of deception.

For example, in my study, one applicant was judged to be lying because he told about an injury he had received to his ‘arm’ in one document and to his ‘shoulder’ in a later interaction. The applicant explained that he did not have access to an interpreter during the preparation of the earlier document and his English was not good enough to distinguish between these two body parts.

Language myth #3: Bilinguals are fully proficient in all their languages

The ‘arm’ vs ‘shoulder’ example brings us to yet another language myth that informs assessments of refugee credibility: officials’ poor understandings of bilingualism. The asylum seeker mentioned above had explained that he used the word ‘arm’ when putting together a statement with a migration lawyer with whom he spoke English, without the assistance of an interpreter, and this is why he had used this more general term rather than the more specific ‘shoulder’.

This claim is easy to accept when we have a nuanced understanding of what it means to be bilingual. Bilinguals usually have different levels of proficiency in their languages. Yet, decision makers usually expect bilinguals to have equal, complete fluency across all their languages. This often leads to the dismissal of explanations related to lack of access to interpreting.

This language myth makes it seem irrelevant whether an applicant communicated through a language they spoke well or not, or whether they had access to interpreting. Conveniently, this language myth provides an easy justification for decreasing public funding for language services.

Language myth #4: The decision maker is outside the interaction

Decision-makers themselves are important co-producers of the refugee narrative and of the official record of the asylum hearing. They ask the questions, and control who can speak and when. They draw on their own experiences and understandings of the world to make sense of asylum seekers’ stories. They also assess any explanations given for credibility-related concerns, drawing on their own beliefs about language in deciding how and whether to give these explanations weight.

Yet, their role in the interaction is routinely erased. Institutional guidance presents the decision-making process as one in which uniformity across different decision-makers is possible, and in which these individuals are able to set aside their “subjective beliefs”. This overlooks the inherently evaluative nature of these processes, discourages critical self-reflection and thus minimizes the decision-maker’s role in constructing asylum seeker credibility.

Language myth #5: Acknowledging intercultural communication ensures fairness

Credibility assessment guidance for refugee visa decision-makers explicitly acknowledges intercultural communication and scope for misunderstandings. However, a vague acknowledgement of intercultural communication may in fact reinforce language myths that entrench existing inequalities and disadvantage minority groups because they are hidden behind the label “intercultural communications”.

The language myths on which credibility assessment guidance is based undermine the fairness of these assessments. Asylum seekers are held responsible for texts whose production are beyond their individual control, variation between decision-makers is under-acknowledged, and the importance of interpreting and legal assistance minimized. Busting these myths challenges the credibility of credibility assessments themselves. To ensure fair processes, these types of assessments should play, at most, a minimal role within refugee decision-making processes. Too much is at stake to rely on inherently unfair assessments, especially in the face of insufficient legal assistance and antagonistic public discourse.

References

Smith-Khan, L. (2020). Why refugee visa credibility assessments lack credibility: A critical discourse analysis, (online, advance).
Smith-Khan, L. (2019a). Communicative resources and credibility in public discourse on refugees. Language in Society, 48(3), 403-427.
Smith-Khan, L. (2019b). Debating credibility: Refugees and rape in the media. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 42(1), 4-36.
Smith-Khan, L. (2019c). Migration practitioners’ roles in communicating credible refugee claims. Alternative Law Journal (online, advance).
Smith-Khan, L. (2018). Contesting credibility in Australian refugee visa decision making and public discourse. (Doctor of Philosophy), Macquarie University.
Smith-Khan, L. (2017a). Different in the same way? Language, diversity and refugee credibility. International Journal of Refugee Law, 29(3), 389-416.
Smith-Khan, L. (2017b). Negotiating narratives, accessing asylum: Evaluating language policy as multi-level practice, beliefs and management. Multilingua, 36(1): 31-57.
Smith-Khan, L. (2017c). Telling stories: Credibility and the representation of social actors in Australian asylum appeals. Discourse & Society, 28(5), 512-534.

Professor Simon Handley, Executive Dean of the Faculty of Human Sciences, congratulates our HDR Excellence Award winners

The year ends on a final high note for our team with three awards testifying to the excellence of the higher degree research (HDR) conducted by our team.

Dr Hanna Torsh received the 2019 Michael Clyne Prize for her thesis “Between pride and shame: Linguistic intermarriage in Australia from the perspective of the English-dominant partner”. The Michael Clyne Prize has been awarded annually since 2008 by the Australian Linguistics Society in recognition of the best postgraduate research thesis in immigrant bilingualism and language contact.

Hanna’s research, which has just been published as a book by Palgrave Macmillan, investigates the tensions between English monolingualism and multilingualism in bilingual couples and Australian society more generally. She shows that, on the one hand, linguistic diversity is practically subjugated to monolingual English-centric norms. On the other hand, discourses which valorise LOTEs and multilingualism are widely cherished as symbolic of tolerance.

This is the third time the Michael Clyne Prize has gone to a member of the Language-on-the-Move team: the 2017 award went to Dr Shiva Motaghi-Tabari, the 2012 award to Dr Donna Butorac, and Dr Vera Williams Tetteh was the 2016 runner-up. Read up on these previous winners here.

Hanna’s book Linguistic Intermarriage in Australia: Between Pride and Shame was launched by Distinguished Professor Ingrid Piller at this week’s annual conference of the Australian Linguistics Society and joins a growing number of monographs published by members of our team.

So much fun launching “Linguistic #intermarriage in #Australia” by @HannaTorsh As befits the @Lg_on_the_Move team, author and launcher are already moving on to the next project … “Life in a new #language” coming soon #AusLingSoc2019 https://t.co/Gyt8Wl4MKu pic.twitter.com/JIcCmOGmZc

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) December 11, 2019

Dr Laura Smith-Khan won the Faculty of Human Sciences HDR Excellence Award for her PhD research about credibility in Australian refugee visa decision making and public discourse.

Laura’s thesis, which can be downloaded here, is a multi-level critical discourse analysis examining the discourse on refugee credibility in Australian media and public debates and visa review decision making. Drawing on newspaper reporting, public statements, procedural guidance and review decisions, it explores how dominant discourse conceptualizes credibility. It identifies discursive constructions of language, communication and diversity, and challenges these by contrasting them with the sociolinguistic realities. It finds that the discourse problematically presents credibility as an individual attribute of the refugee, and erases the effects of interactional context, legal and institutional structures, and discourse itself, on credibility construction.

Hanna and Laura both received their PhDs at a most memorable graduation ceremony in April this year, where Laura’s son stole the show:

Watch the adorable moment Dr @LauraSKh, from @MQLinguistics, welcomes an unexpected visitor on stage while delivering her #graduation ceremony speech. #mymq #mumlife #phdlife #AcademicTwitter pic.twitter.com/R6oUetj8vG

— Macquarie University (@Macquarie_Uni) April 23, 2019

And it is not only our PhDs who excel but our Master of Research students keenly follow in their footsteps: Samar Alkhalil won the Executive Dean’s Master of Research Thesis Award 2019 for her research about the promotion of English in Saudi Arabia.

The thesis, which can be downloaded here, examined the persuasion strategies and the ideological assumptions in a corpus of advertisements for private English Language Teaching institutes in Saudi Arabia. Findings revealed that the institutes attempt to persuade their potential audience to enroll by conceptualizing English as a global language. The advertisements also construct English learning as fun, personally empowering, and confidence-enhancing.

Samar is now building on her Masters research in her ongoing PhD research.

Congratulations, Hanna, Laura, and Samar! Your achievements are testament to the importance of team work and we are so proud of Language on the Move!

And if you want to find out the secrets behind our HDR successes, Laura spills the tea here.

References

Crock, M., Smith-Khan, L., McCallum, R., & Saul, B. (2017). The Legal Protection of Refugees with Disabilities: Forgotten and Invisible? Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar.
Smith-Khan, L. (2017). Different in the Same Way? Language, Diversity, and Refugee Credibility. International Journal of Refugee Law, 29(3), 389-416.
Smith-Khan, L. (2017). Negotiating narratives, accessing asylum: Evaluating language policy as multi-level practice, beliefs and management. Multilingua, 36(1), 31-57.
Smith-Khan, L. (2017). Telling stories: Credibility and the representation of social actors in Australian asylum appeals. Discourse & Society, 28(5), 512-534.
Smith-Khan, L. (2019). Communicative resources and credibility in public discourse on refugees. Language in Society, 48(3), 403-427.
Smith-Khan, L. (2019). Debating credibility: Refugees and rape in the media. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 42(1), 4-36.
Torsh, H. (2020). Linguistic Intermarriage in Australia: Between Pride and Shame. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

The oil slick as seen from space (Source: Wikipedia)

The British decision to exit the European Union (EU) in 2016 came as a surprise to many. In the lead up to the referendum, nationalist discourses were successfully mobilized to promote a vote for the anti-globalisation campaign. Nationalism proved to have an ongoing appeal in our global world.

But these nationalist discourses did not come out of nowhere in 2016 nor were they solely emanating from the sphere of politics.

In a recently published paper, “‘The BP is a great British company’: The discursive transformation of an environmental disaster into a national economic problem”, I examine the relationship between discourses of corporate responsibility and nationalism in the media coverage of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Surprisingly, nationalist discourses featured heavily in reports about that disaster.

The media play a powerful role in shaping our perceptions of global issues, including environmental disasters. The media may obstruct or support interests of various stakeholders, and do not necessarily educate us in an uninterested way.

The 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was the worst industrial disaster in US history and 4.9 million barrel crude were released into the environment. In addition to the huge immediate damage, long-term effects are as yet unknown but are likely to include oil remaining in the food chain for generations to come.

The disaster was the fault of BP (short for “British Petroleum”), a multinational corporation headquartered in the UK operating the oil well, who was found to be “primarily responsible for the oil spill because of its gross negligence and reckless conduct.”

So how did the media represent corporate responsibility in their coverage of the event?

From perpetrator to victim

Comparing UK and US media, I found that the former were less concerned with the environmental impact than the consequences for British interests and even cast BP in the role of victim rather than perpetrator. The Telegraph, for instance, headlined: “Barack Obama’s attacks on BP hurting British pensioners.” The article continued:

Barack Obama has been accused of holding “his boot on the throat” of British pensioners after his attacks on BP were blamed for wiping billions off the company’s value.

The corporation was metaphorically described as a person and depicted as vulnerable and in need of protection:

We need to ensure that BP is not unfairly treated – it is not some bloodless corporation.

It is not unusual for corporate responsibility to be obscured in the media, particularly if no individuals can be clearly identified as “bad guys”. However, British media went beyond that by casting BP as victim rather than perpetrator, and making it stand for a particularly vulnerable segment of the population, namely “British pensioners”.

As a consequence, solidarity was not rallied with the victims of the disaster but the perpetrator:

I want to see the UK government defend the company while it is under this attack.

This blame-shifting where the perpetrator turned victim meant that another scapegoat had to be found to fit the conventional narrative. In this case the head of another state, US president Barack Obama, was cast in that role. This further enhanced the economic and nationalist framing of the environmental disaster:

Although fund managers accept that BP must pay compensation for the oil spill and the damage it is doing to parts of America’s coastline, they argue that the cost to the company’s market value from the president’s criticism is far outweighing the clean-up costs.

In sum, the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill was told in some UK media as a national-economic problem for Britain rather than a global environmental disaster. In the process, corporate responsibility was obscured and readers were led to see the issue as one of national threat to themselves. Reporting the news in this way aligns the readers with corporate economic interests by framing these as national interests.

This framing was then available to be mobilized in the Brexit campaign five years later.

Beyond the British case, my study is also relevant to the revival of nationalist and separatist discourses in other contexts, which similarly obscure that nationalism is entirely irrelevant to the big issues of our time as they pose existential threats to life on this planet. Like an oil spill, these do, after all, not stop at national borders …

Reference

Cramer, R. (2017) ‘The BP is a great British company’: The discursive transformation of an environmental disaster into a national economic problem. Discourse & Communication, 0(0), n/a-n/a. doi:10.1177/1750481317745744

Multilingual advice provided by the Administrate Review Tribunal

Countries in the Global North have developed increasingly sophisticated and complex processes to assess the claims of people seeking asylum. One key challenge is that asylum seekers often have little more than their story to offer up to support their claims. This means that deciding whether or not their stories are credible has become a fundamental step in the assessment process.

Yet the settings in which these decisions are made are emotionally charged and government officials and asylum seekers often have very different experiences, cultures and languages. So it is unsurprising that credibility assessment processes have attracted a lot of scrutiny, with scholars from a range of disciplines offering cautions and suggestions for improvement. Many of these revolve around issues related to cultural and linguistic diversity – communicating a story of persecution in a foreign institution is hardly straightforward. It involves transforming a complex and unique life experience into a neatly ordered refugee narrative that meets the expectations of the government department and the individual tasked with making the decision. A large body of research tells us of the many difficulties with communicating through an interpreter in such settings, or using a second or third language, or a language variety different to that spoken by the official. The official may have completely different life experiences or cultural expectations to that of the asylum seeker, which may make their story appear unrealistic or unbelievable. Officials may also look at asylum seekers’ demeanour to assess their honesty, despite the overwhelming body of research warning against the reliability of such assessments.

In Australia, the Immigration Department (currently known as the Department of Immigration and Border Protection) has recognised the challenges created by the cultural and linguistic diversity of those participating in asylum procedures and has taken steps to address these in its guidance documents. In my article, ‘Different in the same way?: Language, diversity and refugee credibility’ (Smith-Khan 2017a), I look closely at the Australian guidelines on credibility assessment in refugee appeals and consider how they incorporate diversity. I argue that while they acknowledge the need to accommodate applicants with different languages and cultures, there are some dangers arising from the discourse developed in this guidance. In fact, the language used in the guidelines frames applicants as different and largely ignores the decision maker’s own difference or subjectivity. Again and again, they remind us of the applicants’ social and cultural background. Their culture becomes an immutable feature of who they are – something which will inevitably influence their behaviour and way of thinking. While on its own, this may seem a reasonable warning, this contrasts with how the decision makers are presented. The guidelines instruct them:

What is capable of being believed is not to be determined according to the Member’s subjective belief or gut feeling about whether an applicant is telling the truth or not. A Member should focus on what is objectively or reasonably believable in the circumstances.

The officials’ neutrality is reinforced by what they are called in the Guidelines. They are referred to as ‘members’ – i.e. institutional and societal insiders (contrasting sharply with asylum seekers who are ‘applicants’, outsiders waiting to be allowed in). Even more frequently though, they are named ‘the Tribunal’. Thus they take on the ultimate neutrality: by taking the name of the institution they represent, we are to believe that any one decision maker is no different from any other. Therefore, unlike the applicants who are tied to their culture and other social attributes, decision makers are expected to be able to attain objectivity (I discuss this in greater detail in another article (Smith-Khan 2017b. See also my blog post here).

This discourse creates difficulties in two different ways. First, because applicants are repeatedly linked to their social and cultural grouping, they are denied individual idiosyncrasies and quirks. They are expected to behave in ways that are standard to the particular groups to which they are assumed to belong. Where their actions or choices clash with the decision maker’s expectations of someone from this group, they may lose their credibility.

Second, the decision makers’ assumed ability to be objective means they are not encouraged to be self-reflexive, especially in regards to how their own background may influence how they decide what is reasonable or expected behaviour in those they are assessing.

The body in charge of processing asylum appeals in Australia, the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT) (which took over from the separate Refugee Review Tribunal (RRT) in 2015), publishes a selection of its (anonymised) decisions online. From these I selected a corpus of decisions that dealt extensively with credibility. From this corpus I identified two decisions in which diversity was a key issue that arose in assessing credibility.

From my analysis, I discovered that the applicants (and their legal advisers) attempted to point to their cultural and linguistic diversity to overcome issues of inconsistency and plausibility raised by the decision makers. They used arguments pointing to sociolinguistic factors to explain inconsistencies in their descriptions of events. For example, an applicant whose claim revolved around his homosexuality explained how he felt uncomfortable sharing details of his sexual encounters in front of a female interpreter from his country of origin. And an Egyptian applicant noted how his choice of words had been affected by the lack of an interpreter when preparing a written statement, meaning he used a general term (‘arm’) instead of a more specific one (‘shoulder’).

The applicants addressed plausibility concerns in a similar way, pointing to cultural and social factors to explain why their reported actions were not implausible. For example, the homosexual applicant was questioned over his ‘failure to attempt to meet other homosexuals’ for a number of years after arriving in Australia as a student. He explained that he was new in the country, busy with study, had to work to support himself, did not speak English well and was afraid to go out at night, following a spate of attacks on Indian international students.

These types of explanations were mostly dismissed. D’hondt (2009) describes a similar situation in the Belgian criminal justice system. Culture attaches only to the minority participants, yet it is the professionals who retain the power to apply culture in their assessments. He explains:

Categorizing the defendant as a cultural other…prompts the defense attorney to invoke specialist knowledge about the defendant which is not accessible to the defendant him/herself…These attorney-initiated culturizations mobilize common-sense understandings of ‘culture’ (which lack a clearly defined legal status…), without posing a threat to the judiciary’s self-representation as ‘empty’.

In the asylum context, the decision maker is the specialist, entitled to decide what is reasonable behaviour from a person of the applicant’s background. Further, references to accommodating diversity in the Guidelines revolve around issues of communication within the appeal hearing and the applicant’s knowledge, rather than their past behaviour. Although applicants may attempt to mobilize diversity-based arguments to defend themselves, the power remains with the decision maker to determine whether or not to accept such arguments.

The way diversity is constructed in the Guidelines, and then reflected in these decisions demonstrates some of the key concerns put forward in research on intercultural communication. While policy guidelines may seek to sensitize officials to accommodate diversity, such texts may present diversity in such a way as to actually reinforce hierarchical, power asymmetrical structures. Diversity discourse may frame only certain participants as being diverse – e.g. the subjective, culturally and socially influenced applicants vs the objective, neutral decision makers. This can have the effect of ‘othering’ the minority participants and essentializing them into simple categories, while re-entrenching the ‘normal’ and ‘neutral’ status of the mainstream. Difference becomes a fixed and overwhelming attribute that attaches to society’s others and overrides their individuality. This was exemplified in the decision-making in my analysis, most especially in the assessment of the homosexual applicant’s behaviour. It is hard to imagine that a heterosexual person would be misbelieved for their ‘failure’ to date or form a relationship upon arriving in a new country. While the applicant drew on arguments about his social position, cultural and linguistic background, and financial situation, these attributes seemed to be eclipsed by his sexuality. Because this was the key element of his identity for the purpose of the credibility assessment, it seemed that his behaviour was expected to reflect this above all other aspects of who he was. It was the decision maker’s own conceptualization of reasonable behaviour for a young homosexual man against which he was measured – he was expected to actively search out a partner. The plausibility of alternative actions being rejected means that the applicant was denied the privilege of a more complex identity, as an individual with myriad experiences and motivations.

While asylum bodies have come a long way in developing assessment processes, this research demonstrates that challenges remain. Diversity may be acknowledged, but this does not mean that all persons are considered different in the same way. We need to continue to interrogate the way we discuss and present difference and reflect on the effects this has on those who have most to lose in the process.

Related content

• Laura Smith-Khan, Telling stories? Credibility in asylum interviews
• Laura Smith-Khan, Crucial communication: language management in Australian asylum interviews
• Ingrid Piller, The diversity of the other

References

D’hondt S (2009) Others on trial: The construction of cultural otherness in Belgian first instance criminal hearings. Journal of Pragmatics 41: 806-828.
Smith-Khan L (2017a) Different in the same way? Language, diversity and refugee credibility. International Journal of Refugee Law https://doi.org/10.1093/ijrl/eex038
Smith-Khan L (2017b) Telling stories: Credibility and the representation of social actors in Australian asylum appeals. Discourse & Society https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926517710989

Previous research into media discourses surrounding refugees and asylum seekers has shown that these groups are regularly dehumanised through homogenising discourses, and portrayed as a threat to the host societies (e.g. Baker & McEnery, 2005; Gabrielatos & Baker, 2008; Khosravinik, 2009; Sulaiman-Hill, Thompson, Afsar, & Hodliffe, 2011). Refugee arrivals also are referred to in metaphors comparing refugees to movement of water (flooding, pouring, or streaming over borders; camps or centres overflowing) or pestilence (swarms of refugees), which contribute to an image of these groups not as individuals seeking asylum but as some kind of uncontrolled and unpredictable force of nature.

In New Zealand the general view is that our media report issues surrounding refugees and asylum seekers in a fairly benevolent manner compared with other countries, which may have something to do with New Zealand’s geographical distance from most refugee migration. However, this isn’t to say that underlying ideologies in local media discourses don’t recreate and reinforce taken-for-granted narratives that deny power and self-determination to refugees and asylum seekers.

I explored these discourses in New Zealand’s three most widely-read newspapers, The New Zealand Herald, The Dominion Post, and The Press (Greenbank, 2014). Articles were collected from the months leading up to general elections in 2005, 2008 and 2011. I chose these periods to best capture the recognised patterns of increased attention towards refugees, as this group, and immigration generally, are particularly politicised in the months surrounding national elections.

The themes and attitudes associated with a particular word can be revealed by observing the types of lexical items that it commonly appears with or near it – that word’s ‘aura of meaning’, also known as semantic prosody. Put simply, common collocates of a word can become part of its meaning.

I found that the concepts of refugee and asylum seeker are frequently linked to words associated with politics (e.g. political, policies, nations), foreign countries (e.g. Iraq, Nauru, Palestine, Assyrian) and violence (e.g. terrorism, terrorist, conflict) in these articles, particularly when compared to a general corpus of New Zealand newspaper articles. These kinds of associations together can result in an overall negative semantic prosody of refugees as problematic, non-local victims of violence.

Refugees were also afforded much less voice that non-refugee voices in these articles, in terms of number of words attributed through direct quote or paraphrase. Furthermore, the content of quotes and paraphrases often allowed refugees to express gratitude or helplessness, while the technicalities and practicalities of the situation were left to non-refugee ‘experts’ to describe. For example, in a 2014 article from The New Zealand Herald, an eleven-year-old spokesperson for the family is ascribed the following quote:

“Mum wants to say thank you to all those people and may God bless them”

Following from this, a Public Health Nurse is given the role of explaining what goods were donated to the family, and how they will be helpful:

“They have never had a drier before. They didn’t have a toaster. The curtains are very thin, so warm thermal curtains will be awesome. The trailer of firewood — that’s how they heat the house.”

Refugee ‘issues’ are presented here as matters for ‘experts’ to deal with, while refugee voices were largely confined to affective roles, expressing emotion, gratitude and despair. This kind of limited or selective reporting of voice can be a strategy of ‘othering’ certain groups. Othering of refugees can and does occur in other ways in the articles. This may be done through associations of refugee status with crime, as can be seen in the following two excerpts:

A 22-year-old Syrian man, Mohammad Shanar Ryad, a former commando and recent refugee, has been arrested over the murder.

Dahir Noor Shire, 37, who came to New Zealand as a Somali refugee in 1999, gave evidence in his own defence before a jury in Wellington District Court yesterday.

These two men, both accused of crimes, have both their ethnicity and former refugee status explicitly mentioned. Ethnic and refugee-related qualifiers, when repeatedly used in the context of articles about crime, expose an ideology which correlates criminal activity with refugees, and goes some way to actually attributing the crime to refugeehood.

Emphasising positive differences can also result in othering of a given group from a presumed ingroup, as this may fetishise the apparent differences, bestowing exotic or otherworldly attributes to that group. This can be seen in the excerpt below describing a funeral:

Women in headscarves wailed yesterday morning as Eman Jani Hurmiz was carried into the Ancient Church of the East in Strathmore.

This kind of phrasing throughout the article creates the feeling of an exotic spectacle of otherness, using distance to bestow mystery and reverence. Despite perhaps being benevolently enacted, this positive othering still imagines an outgroup whose observed differences from society exclude those groups from that society by implication, affecting their ability to fully participate as members of their community.

In sum, the media discourses that combine semantic prosody, othering, and disparity in voice attribution together make a compelling argument for denial of power to refugees in these representations. The taken-for-granted and out-of-sight discursive processes depict refugees as othered victims, associated with crime and danger, as well as exoticism and helplessness.

Of course, the intentions of the writers of these articles may be honourable. By definition, refugees have experienced adversity, and representing groups as traumatised victims can draw much needed attention to their plight. At the same time, even if benevolently enacted, employing these prevalent discourses of helplessness and othering can have negative real-world consequences for the ways in which the mainstream views refugees, suggesting they are incapable of helping themselves, and impeding full participation in society.

It’s important to recognise ordinary refugee perspectives that are not associated with trauma or suffering, and to consider refugee views and contributions in discourses that concern them. Given the way that all language use generally, and media discourse specifically, reproduce and transform society, re-framing of refugees and asylum seekers in this manner could contribute to addressing the inequalities currently maintained by the mainstream media. Instead of being framed using linguistic strategies that suggest victimhood, refugees and asylum seekers could perhaps better be framed as capable, resilient people who have overcome adversity, who have resisted and freed themselves from oppressive or dangerous situations.

Related content

• Agnes Bodis, Who is a real refugee?
• Laura Smith-Khan, Crucial communication: language management in Australian asylum interviews
• Ingrid Piller, The real problem with linguistic shirkers
• Laura Smith-Khan, We all have a culture, we all speak a language: the Australian legal system discusses diversity
• Ingrid Piller, Bitter gifts: migrants’ exclusive inclusion
• Ingrid Piller, Children as language brokers

References

Baker, P., & McEnery, T. (2005). A corpus-based approach to discourses of refugees and asylum seekers in UN and newspaper texts. Journal of Language and Politics, 4(2), 197–226.

Gabrielatos, C., & Baker, P. (2008). Fleeing, Sneaking, Flooding – A Corpus Analysis of Discursive Constructions of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK Press 1996-2005. Journal of English Linguistics, 36(1), 5–38.

Greenbank, E. (2014). Othering and Voice: How media framing denies refugees integration opportunities. Communication Journal of New Zealand, 14(1), 35–58.

Khosravinik, M. (2009). The representation of refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants in British newspapers during the Balkan conflict (1999) and the British general election (2005). Discourse & Society, 20(4), 477–498.

Sulaiman-Hill, C. M. R., Thompson, S. C., Afsar, R., & Hodliffe, T. L. (2011). Changing Images of Refugees: A Comparative Analysis of Australian and New Zealand Print Media 1998-2008. Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies, 9(4), 345–366.

However, existing research suggests that despite aiming at objectivity, credibility assessments raise a plethora of issues. They are conducted in settings that involve intercultural communication, the use of interpreters, and power inequalities. Limited access to quality legal assistance can also undermine applicants’ ability to put forward a strong case, in the language expected by the institutions tasked with processing their claims. Elsewhere, I have explored how the various participants involved in applications and appeals each play a role in co-constructing the refugee narrative (Smith-Khan 2017a). Yet often, this co-construction is not readily acknowledged in decision-making procedures, placing too much responsibility on the asylum seeker.

In my new article, Telling Stories: Credibility and the representation of social actors in Australian asylum appeals (Smith-Khan, 2017b), I critically analyse the official text guiding credibility assessment in the Australian merit review process, and a corpus of published asylum review decisions. Studies involving critical discourse analysis encourage us to reflect on how the linguistic choices made in texts both reflect and perpetuate certain beliefs. Following Van Leeuwen (1996), I adopt a ‘socio-semantic’ approach to explore how these texts present the different social actors. I reflect on the beliefs behind these presentations, as well as considering the effects the resulting discourse may have on asylum decision-making.

The naming conventions in the Migration and Refugee Division Guidelines on the Assessment of Credibility are particularly striking. Calling the decision-makers ‘Members’ and ‘the Tribunal’, the Guidelines reflect legal language conventions. They position the decision-makers as insiders, taking on the identity of the institution itself. These terms represent and reinforce a belief that decision-makers are capable of neutrality and objectivity, each one expected to act and think in a uniform way, capable of setting aside their individual subjectivity. In contrast, the Guidelines present asylum seekers as subjective ‘applicants’, with multiple references to how they are affected by their social and cultural background. Multiple references are made to the ‘applicant’s account’ and the applicant presenting evidence, reinforcing the belief that it is the applicant who tells the refugee narrative, rather than it being co-constructed by all those involved in the process, with the final, official version being written by the decision-maker (I present a more detailed analysis of the way diversity is dealt with in these texts in another article (Smith-Khan, forthcoming)). Further, there are few references to other participants involved in asylum applications and appeals, such as legal advisers and interpreters. This has the effect of downplaying the role these participants play in helping to construct the refugee narrative, and the many ways in which they may affect the applicants’ credibility in the process.

Analysing my corpus of 27 review decisions, I note that the decision-makers vary in their way of presenting these same social actors, although in general, their approaches reflect those adopted in the Guidelines. For example, a majority of the decision-makers refer to themselves as ‘The Tribunal’, with only a few referring to themselves in the first person. Similarly to the Guidelines, many decision-makers make scant reference to the role played by interpreters and legal advisers. In some cases it is not even clear whether the applicant used English, or whether they had any legal assistance or not.

I argue that the corpus reveals some key challenges for credibility assessments. Firstly, the variations amongst different decision-makers indicates that far from being uniform, they are individuals who each have their own approach to reporting their hearings and sharing their decisions. The minimal references to interpreting, language choice and legal assistance create the impression that these factors are not important in how applicants construct their refugee stories and create and defend their credibility. Further, the decision-maker’s position as objective receiver of information suggests that self-reflection is not encouraged. Overall, this means that when applicants attempt to explain credibility issues such as inconsistency or vagueness by referring to the roles other participants play in shaping their narratives, their arguments are largely ineffective.

The discursive roles assigned to each of the actors involved in these processes suggest that there remains a need to scrutinise credibility assessment processes (and the texts that govern them). It is only through acknowledging and seeking to address the structural challenges and power asymmetries hidden by such discourse that we can improve processes to ensure the best possible outcomes for those seeking our protection.

Related content

• Laura Smith-Khan, Crucial communication: language management in Australian asylum interviews
• Laura Smith-Khan, Discrimination by any other name: Language tests and racist migration policy in Australia
• Laura Smith-Khan, Don’t know what “jurisdictional error” means? Some people’s future depends on it
• Laura Smith-Khan, We all have a culture, we all speak a language: the Australian legal system discusses diversity

References

• Smith-Khan L (2017a) Negotiating narratives, accessing asylum: Evaluating language policy as multi-level practice, beliefs and management. Multilingua 36: 31-57.
• Smith-Khan L (2017b) Telling stories: Credibility and the representation of social actors in Australian asylum appeals. Discourse & Society.
• Smith-Khan L (Forthcoming) Different in the same way? Language, diversity and refugee credibility. International Journal of Refugee Law.
• Van Leeuwen T (1996) The representation of social actors. In: Caldas-Coulthard CR and Coulthard M (eds) Texts and Practices: Readings in Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Routledge, pp. 32-70.

Do we see international students as opportunity or threat? (Screenshot from ‘Degrees of Deception’)

With recent news on the number of international students in Australia reaching a new high and the 19.4 billion-dollar revenue student fees generate for the Australian economy, these students’ experience in Australia has become an important issue. Two different points of view can be distinguished: while one perspective sees international students as enriching Australian society through their diversity, another one frames them as problematic Other. Their imputed low English language proficiency is often seen as the root cause of the latter. While there have been attempts at representing international students in the media through the first perspective, I argue below that these attempts can only work if language proficiency is addressed in a constructive way, that goes beyond the monolingual mindset.

In their study, Paltridge, Mayson and Schappler (2014) analysed news articles covering international students from The Australian newspaper published between 2009 and 2011. The researchers found that media discourses result in the dual phenomenon of ‘welcome and exclusion […] by constructing them as “economic units” wanted and welcomed by the nation, as well as unwanted “exploiters of the immigration system” and excluded “victims” of violence and racism’ (p. 108). These media articles obviously frame students as a problematic out-group.

“Degrees of Deception”

The issue of English language proficiency also featured strongly in an episode of an ABC program, 4 Corners, entitled ‘Degrees of deception’ in April 2015, which focused on declining academic standards. According to the introduction, declining academic standards were evident in the rising ‘tide of academic misconduct’ and the pressure for academics to pass weak students (so-called ‘soft marking’). According to the report, these are due to the combined effect of a decline in government funding for universities and the increasing reliance on international student fees. International students, so the show’s claim, are ‘desperate for a degree from an Australian university and the possibility of a job and permanent residency’. Consequently, entry requirements have supposedly been lowered and cheating and plagiarism have become widespread. The episode claims that academics are appalled but are afraid to speak up for fear of their jobs.

After airing the episode, the 4 Corners team stressed on their Facebook and Twitter accounts that the episode was not about ‘international students being worse than other students’. However, a corpus linguistic analysis of the episode transcript reveals that the the most frequent content words on the show – ‘student’ and ‘students’ – usually refer to ‘international students’. This group was referred to 88% of the time when using the word ‘student’; by contrast, local students are referenced in only 7% of occurrences. Moreover, the word ‘student’ most commonly collocates with or appears close to words with negative connotations, like ‘exploited’, ‘weak/weaker’, ‘targeting’, or ‘struggling’.

Secondly, the vast majority of social media comments on Facebook related to the show discussed international students as inadequate on the basis of some form of low English language competence.

Using Van Leeuwen’s (1996) social actor framework, I have also found that international students as social actors are often abstracted behind concepts such as ‘fall in standards’, ‘poor English’, ‘pressure on the system’, ‘plagiarism’ and ‘income’. The analysis shows that the 4 Corners episode did in fact imply that international students are worse than others; their low English language proficiency is constructed as the root cause of this problem.

What is more, the fact that the findings of Paltridge et al. (2014) focusing on a conservative newspaper, The Australian, are echoed in a data set coming from a more liberal media outlet and its supposedly more liberal audience, suggests that this stereotyping of international students is widespread in Australia.

The Othering of international students on the basis of language proficiency needs to be addressed. One way to do so is by reflectively engaging with linguistic diversity through addressing the monolingual mindset prevalent in Australia, which makes it difficult to move beyond defining international students as the perpetual Other in the ‘white Anglo space’ of the Australian university.

Related content

• Grace Chu-Lin Chang, Language learning challenges of international students
• Grace Chu-Lin Chang, What is “Competent English”?
• Grace Chu-Lin Chang, Losing voice in academic writing
• Ingrid Piller, Exclusion on campus
• Ingrid Piller, Sink or swim for international students
• Kimie Takahashi, Disenchanted in Bangkok

Language Lovers Blogging Competition 2017

If you liked this post, don’t forget to vote for Language on the Move in the 2017 Language Lovers blogging competition over at the ba.bla voting page! Voting closes on June 06.

References

Paltridge, T., Mayson, S., & Schapper, J. (2014). Welcome and exclusion: an analysis of The Australian newspaper’s coverage of international students Higher Education, 68 (1), 103-116 DOI: 10.1007/s10734-013-9689-6

Van Leeuwen, T. (1996). The representation of social actors. In C. R. Caldas-Coulthard & M. Couthard (Eds.), Texts and practices: readings in critical discourse analysis. London, New York: Routledge.

The national character stereotypes of intercultural communication advice are completely mono-dimensional and not inflected by any other aspects of their identities. They are presented as free of class, gender, ethnicity, regional background, personal traits or any other individuating aspects of their being. Much intercultural communication advice is so obviously lacking in common sense – people obviously are rarely, if ever, stick figure representatives of national stereotypes – that it is intriguing to consider why the genre is so successful and continues to flourish.

I suspect it is due to a mismatch between what intercultural communication advice says it does and what it actually does. Ostensibly, intercultural communication advice aims to teach readers better communication skills and to make them more aware of difference and diversity. However, the genre actually does a lot of additional discursive work: it sustains the nation as a key category, presents national belonging as overriding any other aspects of identity, and, consequently, renders other aspects of identity invisible – in short, intercultural communication advice constitutes a prime example of banal nationalism.

The term ‘banal nationalism’ was introduced by the social psychologist Michael Billig ‘to cover the ideological habits which enable the established nations of the West to be reproduced’ (Billig, 1995, p. 6).

Many people think of nationalism as extremism. However, Billig points out that nationalism is the endemic condition of established nation states, that it is enacted and re-enacted daily in many mundane, almost unnoticeable, hence ‘banal’, ways. It is these banal forms of nationalism that lead people to identify with a nation. Examples of banal nationalism are everywhere although they often go unnoticed. Typically, the discourses of banal nationalism emanate directly from state institutions. They are then taken up by non-state actors and become enmeshed with a range of discourses that at first glance have nothing to do with nationalism at all, such as intercultural communication advice.

Page from Persian primer: reading passage ‘We are the children of Iran’

The discourses of banal nationalism are often embedded in the practices of state institutions. Schooling is a prime example of the way in which children are socialised into a national identity. It is school where we become members of the nation and where we are taught to think of ourselves as nationals. The Pledge of Allegiance in many public schools in the USA is an oft-quoted example. On the other side of the world, in Australia, many public schools hold a weekly assembly, where the school community comes together to listen to a speech, watch a performance or be part of an award ceremony. The joint singing of the national anthem plays a central part in the school assembly. In yet another example, Indonesian public schools conduct a flag-raising event every Monday morning and also on every 17th of the month (in commemoration of the national Independence Day, which is celebrated on 17 August).

In addition to ceremonial activities such as these, the socialisation into the nation is also part of teaching content in many schools around the world: there are the lyrics of national poems that are used to teach students how to read and write, the national anthem that is taught in music and recital lessons, the focus of much history teaching on national history, or the valorisation of the national language as the only legitimate medium of educational activities.

Banal nationalism on a cornflakes box

Schooling is widely controlled by the state and the fact that it is used as a vehicle to socialise students into the nation is maybe not particularly surprising. However, the discourses of banal nationalism also emanate from less likely sources. Billig’s (1995) example of the daily weather forecast on TV is a particularly convincing one: the daily weather forecast is usually presented against an image of the national map – as if national borders were meaningful to weather patterns. Banal nationalism in sports has also been widely studied: sporting competitions are typically framed as national competitions and most spectators are more likely to support co-national competitors on the basis of their nationality rather than using criteria such as sportsmanship or elegance of the game.

Yet another domain of banal nationalism can be found in consumer advertising, where national imagery is used to create positive associations with a product or service or consumption in general. At the same time, the use of national imagery in consumer advertising increases the presence of national imagery in the mundane spaces of everyday life and thereby continually reinforces the message of national belonging. The discourses of banal nationalism that come associated with consumer advertising have come to pervade our private lives.

Associating products with national imagery is a widely used marketing strategy in Australia, just as it is in many other countries (click here for examples of a car painted in the Union Jack, French on cookies or UAE-themed coffee and cake). Through everyday items such as the cornflakes box in the image, national symbols enter mundane everyday spaces such as supermarket shelves and the breakfast table in our homes. They keep circulating in those spaces as constant small reminders of national identity.

National identity is a discursive construction – a highly pervasive one but a construction nonetheless. This point is basic to most of the contemporary social sciences but it continues to elude the literature on intercultural communication, where national identity tends to be treated as a given. In the end, intercultural communication advice is nothing but yet another instance of banal nationalism, a discourse that reinforces readers’ sense of national belonging rather than one that leads them to genuinely engage with difference and diversity.

References
Billig, M. (1995). Banal Nationalism. London: Sage.
Piller, I. (2017). Intercultural Communication: A Critical Introduction (2nd ed.) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Everyone wants to be a winner in the dating game; but it doesn’t always work that way …

A 2015 article in the New York Post argued that mobile dating apps, such as Tinder and its many clones, are ultimately ‘tearing society apart’ by drastically changing the way young single adults in Western society seek and pursue romantic and sexual partners.

A recent study by Mitchell Hobbs, Stephen Owen and Livia Gerber (2016) asks whether that assessment is really true. The project explores the experiences of dating app users and investigates how the technology has influenced their sexual practices and views on romantic ideals and long-term relationships.

Offline desires, online realities

Meeting sexual and romantic partners specifically through dating apps has four characteristics: First, users are able to engage in casual, one-off or short-term, sexual encounters without engaging in any further social interaction. Second, dating apps allow users to broaden their romantic networks, extending beyond their existing social networks. Thirdly, dating apps are an efficient means of connecting with several potential partners at the same time. And, fourth, the emergence of dating apps has perpetuated a culture in which communication is increasingly focused around self-presentation and self-commodification.

The latter characteristic in particular may generate a sense of anxiety and frustration around the need to create a successful profile.

Self-presentation in the dating game

Mobile dating apps were initially designed as a type of game to take the stress and emotional investment out of dating. The tactile functionality of the app, combined with users’ photo-based profiles resembles a virtual stack of cards: Profiles are presented like playing cards, and the user can swipe left on the screen to ‘dislike’ or swipe right to ‘like’ a profile. These profiles are only shown once – swiping left to ‘dislike’ therefore eliminates these profiles from the ‘game’. Mutual right swipes result in a ‘match’ and only then can communication be initiated. Successful tindering is therefore in part measured by the amount of matches one obtains, as one of our participants explained:

Yeah when you get matched it’s like ooh! That’s quite cool, that’s the fun part and that’s also probably quite the addictive part of it as well, I’d imagine. And yeah it’s obviously good for good feelings.

Despite this elation of getting a match, many – particularly male – participants expressed a sense of frustration over their lack of success (i.e. their lack of matches) when using dating apps, indicating that dating apps may be perpetuating the exact anxiety they were designed to eliminate:

Tinder is purely based on looks. It’s a numbers’ game essentially. It’s swipe how many times you want. Um so I don’t personally like it still as a primary means of finding a relationship.

Engagement with the ‘game’ creates a level of anxiety that appears to stem from not gaining access to the smorgasbord of potential sexual and romantic partners theoretically available through dating apps. As another male participant remarked:

Everyone is copping a root but me.

In the online sphere, unattractive men have less chances at winning mutual matches, creating a sense that the average-looking guy is missing out on the dating game:

The 10% of highly attractive people fucking all the time make the rest of us feel bad.

In an offline context, ‘average-looking’ guys might be able to harness their interpersonal and communication skills instead:

I’m not suited to this app. I’m trying to find the right phrase but like the profiles that you think would get like high likes because of certain things they put in isn’t really me and I don’t try and do it. I also just think I’m more traditional in so far as I like to bump into someone at a bar or room across- eyes across a room that’s how I actually connect with people because I think half of meeting someone the fun is body language like reading little bits of body language.

In sum, how to present oneself in the best possible light online is a major concern for the users of dating apps. Whilst some participants felt that they are not suited to mobile dating apps due to a lack of successful self-presentation strategies, others engage in self-commodification in an attempt to increase their dating app success.

Self-commodification in the Tinder game

Self-commodification becomes an essential part of designing one’s profile. One interviewee described how he helped his friend to improve his Tinder profile:

So I ask ‘Can I look at your profile and can I change it for you?’ So I get him a different picture and I make his profile his ‘buyer’ – he didn’t have a buyer. I made his profile a buyer, and said ‘You can always go back’ and it blew up! It was almost like in the movies.

Users have the option of adding additional information or captions (referred to here as a ‘buyer’ and elsewhere as ‘digital pick-up line’) to their profiles. While some profiles strategically communicate very little, some male participants reported feeling put off by long digital pick-up lines:

So most of the time apparently it’s just a highly sexualised or very blunt statement of intentions. Um there are funny ones. But um and then some like you see some girls will put- um have like a really long thing, really long statement about fun-loving. Everyone in the world apparently is fun-loving. Oh god. Worst, most overused statement I’ve ever- but anyway [sighs] um the- at the very end of these monstrous spiels sometimes they’ll write ‘say orange if you’ve read this.’ And so you’re expected if you match, the first thing you say to them is orange to show that you’ve actually read through it.

In general, men appear to be less particular about whom they swipe right on in an attempt to increase their chances of gaining a match. However, these swipes do not always result in the kind of match the users were looking for, as another participant indicated:

He was frustrated cause of like five matches he’d had in the last two weeks four of them turned out to be prostitutes. The thing that made him so angry was that one of them actually talked to him for a whole week before she told him her rates.

In sum, male participants reported many frustrations related to looking for love on the move: getting a match was not actually ‘as easy as play’ – and even if they got matches, they were not always the kind of match they desired.

Changing communication strategies for the sexual marketplace

Dating apps certainly do not take the stress out of trying to find love, sex and romance. On the contrary, they may be creating new anxieties around online communication strategies. Male users, in particular, expressed frustration over the need to brand themselves as desirable commodities in the sexual marketplace. If dating apps are indeed ‘tearing society apart’ it is not because they result in everyone having casual sex all the time but because they create many more desires than they can fullfil.

If you like this post, you might also like

• No Sex for Generation On-the-Move
• Language shift and phone sex
• To English with love

Reference

Hobbs, M., Owen, S., & Gerber, L. (2016). Liquid love? Dating apps, sex, relationships and the digital transformation of intimacy Journal of Sociology DOI: 10.1177/1440783316662718

Jinhyun Cho was awarded her PhD for her thesis about “Interpreting English language ideologies in Korea: dreams vs. realities”

Many people around the world dream of learning English. The pursuit of English is rarely only, or even predominantly, about language learning: it’s about self-improvement, self-transformation and the aspiration to live a better life. Unsurprisingly, with English as with anything else in life, dreams and realities do not always match. Recent PhD research conducted by Jinhyun Cho at Macquarie University examines this gap between dreams and realities of English in the national context of South Korea and for one of the most intensely engaged groups of English language learners, namely female translators and interpreters.

The thesis is now available for open-access downloaded and can be accessed here.

This research explores English language ideologies in Korea in relation to the recent phenomenon of “English fever” or yeongeo yeolpung, which refers to the frenzied pursuit of English as valued language capital among Koreans. The popularity of English in Korea has recently attracted significant scholarly attention in sociolinguistics. Despite a growing body of research on the issue of English in Korean society, the question of how the promises of English translate into lived experiences and life course trajectories remains underexplored.

Based on a multi-method qualitative approach, the study draws on three sets of data through which to present a holistic picture of the tensions between dreams and realities in relation to English in Korea: historical textual data, media discourses, and one-on-one interviews with 32 English-Korean translators and interpreters.

Historical textual data are used to trace the genealogy of English in Korea since the late 19^th century via Japanese colonization, the post-independence period and industrialization, to government-led globalization campaigns. The English language ideologies identified through the historical periodisation serve as a baseline for the analyses at macro as well as micro levels.

Contemporary English language ideologies are then elucidated through media discourse analyses of news items related to English-medium lectures in higher education in order to examine how dreams about English are sustained and how such dreams contrast with actual classroom experiences.

In order to understand the uptake of these macro-level language ideologies by individuals, interview data from translators and interpreters as the most engaged group of English language learners are then examined. This includes an exploration of the ways in which individual pursuits of linguistic perfectionism reinforce linguistic insecurity in relation to dominant neoliberal discourses of desirable language speakers. Disparities between dreams and realities in English as experienced by the participants are examined from a gender perspective to show that the pursuit of translation and interpreting is a gendered career choice in relation to societal norms of females. Particular attention is paid to the recent media phenomenon of “good-looking interpreters.” The analysis demonstrates how English has been remoulded as an embodied capital in which aesthetic qualities of speakers can enhance the value of English.

The findings of this study highlight the multiplicity and evolutionary nature of English language ideologies. The historical documentation of the development of English suggests English as multiple forms of capital – cultural, economic, political, social and symbolic – with class mobility as a key driver. In addition to the earlier meanings of English, the micro-level investigations illustrate more diverse aspects of English as a gendered tool to achieve desirable female biographies, as an instrument to enhance individual competitiveness, and as added value to personal aesthetics. While such diverse ideologies attached to English testify to the enormous value attached to English and possibly answer the question as to why English is so popular in Korea, the examination of media discourses about English-medium lectures reveals the use of English as a tool to sustain existing societal structures that advantage the already powerful conservative media. Combined with the constant mediatisation of the benefits of English, neoliberal influences on English in which achieving linguistic perfectionism is presented as real and feasible further contribute to masking the sustained gap between dreams and realities in English. As people blame themselves for lacking individual commitment to the mastery of English as celebrated in popular neoliberal personhood, the substantial costs of the pursuit of English remain hidden, which in turn drives more people to pursuing English and further fuels “English fever”.

Overall, the research illuminates historical, mediatized and gendered aspects of English as an ideological construct. The study has implications for future research and stakeholders, particularly as related to the need to rethink English as a global language, the diversification of English language ideologies in gender, and the potential of translation and interpreting for interdisciplinary research.

Related content

• English Gangnam Style
• Why does English spread in global academia
• Would you mind if your child wanted to become an interpreter?
• Internationalization and Englishization in higher education
• Early study abroad students in young adulthood
• Does internationalization change research content?
• The dark side of TESOL
• Warning: Global English may harm your mental health

References

Cho, J. (2012). Campus in English or campus in shock? English Today, 28 (02), 18-25 DOI: 10.1017/S026607841200020X
Cho, J. (2015). Sleepless in Seoul: Neoliberalism, English fever, and linguistic insecurity among Korean interpreters Multilingua DOI: 10.1515/multi-2013-0047
Cho, J. (2016). Interpreting English Language Ideologies in Korea: Dreams Vs. Realities. (PhD), Macquarie University. Retrieved from http://minerva.mq.edu.au:8080/vital/access/manager/Repository/mq:60718 [open access to full thesis]
Piller, I., & Cho, J. (2013). Neoliberalism as language policy Language in Society, 42 (01), 23-44 DOI: 10.1017/S0047404512000887 [open access to full article]